What is End2End Monitoring?

(The internet will give you a lot of different answers to this question.)

End2End monitoring is the periodic monitoring of business critical processes and applications from the end user’s perspective.
The focus here is on the perfect interaction of all involved components and subsystems which makes the application useable at first.

Monitoring systems like Checkmk may give you a lot of important metrics about an IT infrastructure.
But it is dangerous to draw too much conclusions from that (like webshop is running, if A and (B and (C or D) or (E and F and G))...).

In other words: whether a car is not ready to start can be determined with a careful inspection with a checklist (tires, steering, fuel, …).
But only a test ride will show if it can drive indeed… 🚗

Reasons for End2End monitoring

The “mission” of every IT - be it big or small - is the delivery of services and applications to users (or other systems which are used by users).

The IT infrastructure is the crown jewel of your company. 💎
Its value is determined by the application quality peceived by the end user.

It should be in the interest of everybody with responsibilities in IT to monitor in particular, what his IT is measured by.

End2End monitoring

  • can reliably alarm when applicatoins are not functional anymore
  • can detect insidious declines of the application’s performance - long before users will recognize it.
  • can produce evidence against allegations about bad application performance ("…our E2E Robot at this location did not have this problem")

Reasons for End2End monitoring with Robot Framework

There are many tools and ways to test applications from the end user’s perspective. But hardly one fulfils all these criteria:

  • Future-proof: Can I still use this tool in 15 years?
  • Independent: How many (or few…) consultants/companies are able to support me? How much special knowledge is needed? (niche specialists know their price!)
  • Flexibility: Can I use this tool for all my needs? Or only for web testing or only on Windows?
  • Transparency: Is it possible to expand this tool with own functinality?
  • Economy: Are licence costs eating the hair from my head?
  • Community: Where can I ask questions before I have to call a consultant in?
  • Usability: How long does it take for new colleagues to be acquainted with the tool?

The open source tool Robot Framework fulfills all these criteria.

Thanks to the library concept it is not tied to any testing technology - which is maybe the reason why Robot Framework is on market since 15 years now and why it braves commercial products.

The Libraries equip Robot Framework with special technical capabilities, such as testing keywords for

  • browsers
  • desktops (e.g. Windows GUI)
  • APIs (SOAP, REST, etc)
  • Kubernetes
  • databases
  • and many more.

RobotMK was written by ELABIT and integrates RobotFramework test results into Checkmk:

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Ensure availabilty, functionality and performance of your business applications with End2End monitoring.
End2End tests with Robot Framework, Checkmk and Robotmk save time, reputation and money.