Synthetics monitoring with New Relic for PowerSchool products
Beginning August 2018, the school district I work for rolled out a new Learning Management System, PowerSchool Learning, for use by faculty, staff and students. While our primary Student Information System (PowerSchool SIS) is housed on-premises, the learning management module is hosted by the vendor. One of the concerns brought to my attention prior to the rollout was monitoring i.e. what kind of notice were we to expect during outages, and how could we most effectively communicate that to all effected parties. So, to start with we needed an effective way to verify that a client could log in to the self-hosted SIS, then navigate through to the offsite-hosted LMS. While there are many monitoring products out there, and many are very good at what they do, we eventually settled on using New Relic Synthetic Monitoring. The primary considerations for that were as follows; the scripted browsers are easily configurable, the built-in tracking for Servic...