Imagine your’re working on a bigger feature in a complex piece of software. Your implementation is complete, all tests in scope turned green and you push your changes for integration testing. Then, some integration tests from a completely different module fail and you have no clue which change may have caused this. Now you start analyzing the issue. Probing your commits by hand would end up in a very tedious process for sure. Thankfully git can do all the work for you, while you enjoy a cup of coffee.

The high-level command git bisect allows you to automatically run a specified test procedure, while it’s crawling through your commit history to find the bad revision.

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Just in time before X-Mas holidays starts, we crate a huge release of our open source end-to-end testing framework Sakuli. The v1.1.0 release brings a bunch of new features and a brand new documentation with. The list of the current changes you will find bellow. Also we created a Short Overview Presentation so that you be able to get quick intro about what purpose of Sakuli is.

Also we wan’t to say a big THANK YOU for the great support of our contributors, our valued supporting companies and at least ConSol for making this possible as open source software. Double Thumbs up!!!

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The Tutorial “Docker based E2E application monitoring with Xfce UI and OMD Labs” describes how to:

• Implement a complete containerized end-to-end monitoring environment
• Testing HTML content
• Testing native UI content
• Setting up a monitoring with OMD Labs:
  • Grafana graphs about the performance times (end user perspective)
  • Alerts on errors with screenshots
• Continuous execution of the test suite in a loop

Sources: see github.com/ConSol/sakuli-examples

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The Prometheus monitoring tool follows a white-box monitoring approach: Applications actively provide metrics about their internal state to the Prometheus server. In order to instrument an application with Prometheus metrics, you have to add a metrics library and call that library in the application’s source code. However, DevOps teams do not always have the option to modify the source code of the applications they are running.

At this year’s Devoxx conference, Fabian Stäber did a talk on how to instrument Java Web Applications with Prometheus metrics without modifying the application’s source code.

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When developing software that exchanges data with other components or services you may be confronted with the proper simulation of those foreign services during integration testing. This is because you need to connect with a foreign service
that is simply not available on your local machine or in a test environment.

For unit testing purpose you can use mocks that help out to simulate proper responses. There will be times where your software is deployed to a test environment
in order to perform some acceptance tests with your stakeholders before going to a final release. Usually this is also done with the customer exploring the software through manual testing. In these situations traditional service mocking is not
a good option and you need a real simulator instance that receives requests and responds with proper test data.

This is exactly what the Citrus simulator project provides for you. Standalone simulation and complex request/response processing with solid validation capabilities. The Citrus simulator provides a very easy and reliable definition of inbound and outbound messages for different scenarios.
Good news is that this is not only for Http REST interfaces but also for SOAP WebService, JMS, RMI, mail messaging and many more. So you can use the simulator whenever you need to integrate with another service that is simply not available on your local machine or in your test environment.

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Docker Headless VNC Container 1.2.0 has been released today. The different Docker images contains a complete VNC based, headless UI environment for testautomation like Sakuli does or simply for web browsing and temporary work in a throw-away UI container. The functionality is pretty near to a VM based image, but can be started in seconds instead of minutes. Each Docker image has therefore installed the following components:

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Which programming language should we use to write monitoring check_plugins? This question rose some discussion and this post is trying to give some hints.

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I recently had to deal with two projects that have a common origin but separated at some point in time. I now had to try to bring them back together again - basically merging the changes. Sounds like a pretty standard git merge or git rebase job.

Unfortunately the separation was done in a not so clever way. Someone cloned the original repository, checked out some branch, made some first refactoring steps, got rid of the git stuff (probably rm -rf .git) and started a new git repository with this status. Rumors are that the situation at that time was so tense that people wanted to make a clear cut - which they did in a technical way.

Quite some time later it was my task to try to get the projects together again. The only input I had was two git URLs and the above story.

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Have you ever written a NEB (Nagios Event Broker) module? This article will explain a tool which makes this a lot easier, especially if the reason was that you are not familiar with C or C++. In this case the “Go NEB Wrapper” could come very handy and if you are new to this topic it is a good point to start with.

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OMD Labs Edition 2.60 has been released today. The OMD Labs Edition is based on the standard OMD but adds some more useful addons like Grafana and Prometheus or additional cores like Icinga 2 and Naemon. This release updates many of the shiped components and adds some interesting options when resolving update conflicts.

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