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First run of Canarytrace

What you’ll learn#

  • You will know how to run Canarytrace Smoke
  • You will know what data it collects
  • You will be know how to prepare the environment for data storage and visualization
  • You get a dashboards with visualizations

Welcome to Canarytrace#

This tutorial introduces you to the essentials of Canarytrace community edition by walking you through run first smoke on your localhost.

Canarytrace is a Plug’n'Play stack for testing, monitoring availability and measuring the loading speed your web application from user perspective. The canarytrace design is designed to be easy to run and maintenance-free. So you only need 5 minutes 👌

Prerequisites#

Only Docker. If you don't know the docker, take a look at our examples.

Step-by-step#

We will go step by step to start testing successfully.

Run Elasticsearch in a Docker#

Data from Canarytrace are continuously stored to Elasticsearch.

Create a user-defined bridges

docker network create canary
  • Elasticsearch is the distributed search and analytics engine at the heart of the Elastic Stack.
docker run --name elasticsearch --net canary --rm -d -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 -e "discovery.type=single-node" -e ES_SETTING_XPACK_SECURITY_ENABLED=false -e ES_SETTING_ACTION_DESTRUCTIVE__REQUIRES__NAME=false docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:8.2.0 bin/elasticsearch -Enetwork.host=0.0.0.0

Run Kibana in a Docker#

Kibana is a web application with GUI for viewing data stored in Elasticsearch.

docker run --name kibana --net canary --rm -d -p 5601:5601 docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:8.2.0

Open localhost:5601 in your browser and wait for Kibana will be ready.

Setup Elasticsearch and Kibana#

docker run --name installer --net canary --rm quay.io/canarytrace/installer:1.0

Prepare script for run Canarytrace Smoke#

For this demo we use docker-compose. Create file with name docker-compose.yaml with code:

version: "3.8"
services:
browser:
image: selenium/standalone-chrome:4.1.1-20211217
network_mode: "host"
shm_size: '2gb'
volumes:
- /dev/shm:/dev/shm
canarytrace:
image: quay.io/canarytrace/canarytrace-pub:<your-canarytrace-image-tag>
depends_on:
- browser
network_mode: "host"
environment:
BASE_URL: 'https://canarytrace.com/;https://webperf.canarytrace.com/'
ELASTIC_CLUSTER: http://localhost:9200
LICENSE: 'XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX'
LABELS: 'compose, pipeline'
PT_AUDIT: 'allow'
PT_AUDIT_THROTTLING: 'desktopDense4G'

Run Canarytrace smoke with two URLs.#

In this same location where is your docker-compose.yaml run docker compose

docker-compose up

and result is

canarytrace_1 | "spec" Reporter:
canarytrace_1 | ------------------------------------------------------------------
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0] Running: chrome (v91.0.4472.77) on linux
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0] Session ID: 86b9c22616a6c062d8e991b24c747f70
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0]
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0] » /smoke/smoke.js
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0] Smoke
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0] ✓ smoke-setup
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0] ✓ https://canarytrace.com/
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0] ✓ performance audit
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0] ✓ https://www.teststack.cz/
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0] ✓ performance audit
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0]
canarytrace_1 | [chrome 91.0.4472.77 linux #0-0] 5 passing (15.7s)
canarytrace_1 |
canarytrace_1 |
canarytrace_1 | Spec Files: 1 passed, 1 total (100% completed) in 00:00:19

If you have problem with docker-compose look at the bugs #44, #45 from the community

What data is stored into Elasticsearch#

Canarytrace collect these data

  • c.report-* index with test step name and function result passed / false
  • c.performance-entries-* index with collected list of all PerformanceEntry objects for the tested page.
  • c.smoke-title-* index with entryURL, responseUrl, title, responseStatus and responseStatusText
  • c.audit-* index with metrics from performance audit.

View the result in Kibana#

That's all 🎉 Now you can explore dashboard and visualizations in Kibana. Open http://localhost:5601/ in your browser and navigate to Dashboard / Canarytrace Smoke Overview

Architecture

For real use or for production use start your Canarytrace on cloud in Kubernetes.

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