Will koality.io work for my site?

The most common question we get about koality.io is: "Does the tool work for us? We use XY? ". The good news is, in almost all cases we can answer that answer with yes.

Of course, the question is valid. Developers who build on CMS systems written in PHP often have a (very) different way of developing than those, which are based on NodeJs, for example. At least that's how it looks at first glance. But the similarities are much greater than assumed.

Blackbox testing

koality.io belongs to the black-box testing and monitoring tools. Specifically, this means that we look at the site from the outside. Just like a browser would do. And on the outside, they are all "the same". A little HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The big advantage with black box testing is that we don't have to install any plugins or pixels for us to collect data. We also don't relatively indifferent to what technology the HTML was built with. All analysis is based on the HTML or the DOM (document object model).

DOM vs. HTML

What really makes a difference is the frontend framework used. In a time before JavaScript frameworks, such as vue, react or angular, HTML was delivered by the server as it was then rendered by the browser. This has fundamentally changed. The HTML has been replaced in many cases by JavaScript code, which then builds the pages.

Many monitoring tools use the HTML delivered by the server to drive their analysis (e.g. with cUrl). These tools therefore cannot analyze framework-based web pages. koality.io goes the extra mile and renders all URLs to be examined with a real browser (Chrome). This means that we do not look at the HTML from the server, but at the DOM generated by the browser and JavaScript. In this you can then find all the important information. Additionally all images and other assets are loaded as well. This allows us to get accurate information about the website and alert in case of anomalies.

Basic Auth, Login and Firewalls

Some systems are protected, so you can't always visit all the pages that are relevant. This is where koality.io is being expanded so that basic auth, user logins and firewalls are no longer obstacles. koality.io, as the little brother of Leankoala, can access all the mechanisms of the Enterprise Saas solution, so this will be possible in the near future.