Global Service Monitor Beta Release now supports MultiStep/Authenticated transactions

System Center Global Service Monitor Beta

With the release of System Center 2012 SP1 Beta, Global Service Monitor now supports new functionality of being able to run Visual Studio authored Web Performance Tests. This capability adds support for most requested features customers have asked for since we shipped GSM Customer Preview:

1. Ability to do multi-step synthetic transactions

2. Support for authenticated transactions within multi-step tests.

Sample

 Assume you are building a DinnerNow style app. The screenshot below shows the sample dinner ordering app with restaurant search capability.

With Visual Studio Ultimate you can create a Web Performance Web Test which would look like below. Here we have a couple of search transactions with sample data and validating that the response has valid search results.

In Visual Studio you can add various validation rules to this multistep transaction including Find Text, Response Time Goal and Response URL. Once the test is validated in your Visual Studio environment, developers can provide the same DinnerNow.webtest to Ops who can plug it into System Center Operations Manager 2012 like seen below. (There are some restrictions around ThinkTime and such which GSM doesn't allow)

Above we have configured GSM to run and monitor the DinnerNow.webtest from four locations (London, Zurich, Miami and Sydney). And there you have it -- Good from London/Sydney, but the webtest is failing from Miami/Zurich.

Each failure should trigger an Alert in the SCOM2012 Console which describes the reason for failure: