Recommendation for synthetics transaction flows

[AK]

Hello Folks,

We are in initial stage to configure the Dynatrace Synthetic for our customer and they wants to monitor some business critical steps/flows. However, those will write a data to application. Few of the use cases as follows,

1. Create account - (Here, whenever monitor will run it will create new user on application)
2. Some kind of survey - (Here, 1st iteration of monitor wont find the survey "click on survey" button on monitor will fail in 1st run itself)

How can we monitor such kind of business transaction flows under Dynatrace Synthetic?

Can someone please guide and recommend?

Regards,

AK

[ChadTurner · Accepted solution]

synthetics is going to be the same thing over and over, especially for input. If you are having "Kevin" create a user account on step 1, it will always supply the input Kevin, unless your application has a button that just creates a user account and assigns a random ID. Same goes for the Survey, if its the same survey that comes up each time you can put in static input as results, but you cant add dynamic like selecting poor vs great. 

[AntonioSousa · Accepted solution]

@AK, you can do all sort of things with the Javascript interface available with Dynatrace synthetics. Please beware of some things that might fail, based on my experience:

• If you generate random names, or whatever, beware that there might be collisions, which might invalidate the process and cause spurious problems.
• You might have to check by Javascript that certain options in the page are available or not, as the "click on survey" that you mention. This is easily achievable with Javascipt.
• You might have to have some logic that inverts selections that you've made. I give for example an application that we monitor and that sets up vacations for an employee. Given that he cannot have more than x days per year, we have to book vacations and than unbook them. Even then, we check next time if it is booked first, and if it is, we book another day, than we unbook all that are booked. This is needed, because it might have failed before between the booking and unbooking.
• Eventually, you can do even crazier things. Check out one you probably remember: https://community.dynatrace.com/t5/Synthetic-Monitoring/How-to-make-multi-factor-authentication-work...