Protocol Bots
These bots control multi-threaded HTTP clients, for monitoring your APIs and static sites at the protocol layer. Simulate real user traffic by firing off a sequence of HTTP/S requests and validating the responses, to make sure everything is running smoothly.
Scripting Style
Monitoring Static Sites
★★★☆☆
Monitoring Complex Web Apps
★★☆☆☆
Monitoring HTTP APIs
★★★★★
Protocol Bots are awesome when you need precise control over your HTTP requests, like when you're testing a REST, SOAP, or GraphQL API. For complex web applications and rich static sites, check out Browser Bots instead.
FAQs
about Protocol Bots
Q: When are Protocol Bots a good choice?
A: Protocol Bots shine when you need precise control over individual HTTP requests. The most obvious
such case is for testing or monitoring an HTTP API (REST, GraphQL, SOAP, etc). API monitoring scripts
might hit just a single endpoint, or they might chain together multiple endpoints one after another,
taking the output of one endpoint to feed into the next.
Q: When are Protocol Bots NOT a good choice?
A: First of all, they only speak the HTTP/S protocol, so if you are testing sockets or some other protocol, these
bots won't be of much use. Even for complex web applications, certain interactions such as OAuth or SSO
flows can be difficult (though not impossible) to script with Protocol Bots. For these, you'll likely have an easier
time with Browser Bots.
Q: What kind of things can Protocol Bots customize on the HTTP requests?
A: When scripting for Protocol Bots, you can specify the HTTP Method (GET, POST, etc...), the URL,
request headers, and request body. Pretty much every supported part of an HTTP request.
Read more about it in Protocol Scripts.
Q: Can Protocol Bots analyze the responses that come back, or just blindly fire off requests?
A: Steps in a protocol script can have Validators
and Capturers. Validators can look at the status code,
response size, response time, and content to make sure the response was what you expected and the site is
behaving normally. Capturers take it a step further by extracting a value from the response into a
variable that you can use again later in your script.
Want to detect and fix API problems in record time?