cedexis.radar

Deprecation Warning

As Cedexis concentrates efforts on improving the JavaScript client, we're deprecating the various native client implementations, including this one. The preferred approach is to run the JavaScript client in a web browser available to your platform. For headless servers, we offer this example of executing Radar sessions using Xvfb and Firefox:

https://github.com/cedexis/radar-runner/tree/master/Headless

The main reason for this change is to improve the quality and consistency of Radar data by relying solely on the Navigation Timing and Resource Timing APIs provided by most modern browsers.

Overview

This package provides a library that can be used to conduct Cedexis Radar measurements in any language that supports Python bindings. It also provides a script that can be used to run a Radar session from the command line.

To make practical use of its features, you should sign up for a free Cedexis account. Your Cedexis customer id is a required argument to the main API call and the command line tool.

Requires: Python 2.7+

Installation

Using pip

The preferred method on platforms that support it is to install the package using pip:

$ pip install cedexis.radar

Tip

On some platforms, you make need to preface this command with sudo -H.

From source

You can also install the package from source:

$ cd /tmp
$ git clone https://github.com/cedexis/cedexis.radar
$ cd cedexis.radar
$ python setup.py install

Command Line Tool

Installation includes a command line tool called cedexis-radar-cli, which is a shim for the "main" function in the cedexis.radar.cli module.

Usage

Example:

$ cedexis-radar-cli -c 10660
2.7.5+ (default, Sep 19 2013, 13:48:49)
[GCC 4.8.1]
cedexis.radar.cli (INFO): Config file used:
cedexis.radar.cli (INFO): Command line args: Namespace(api_key='sandbox', config_file='', customer_id=10660, provider_id=None, secure=False, tracer=None, zone_id=1)
cedexis.radar (INFO): 2 providers measured

Full argument list:

Argument	Description
--help/-h	HELP Show a help message and exit
--zone-id/-z	ZONE_ID Your Cedexis Zone ID (defaults to 1)
--customer-id/-c	CUSTOMER_ID Your Cedexis Customer ID
--api-key/-k	API_KEY Reserved for future use
--secure/-s	Use HTTPS If specified, only measure providers configured with HTTPS probes
--tracer/-t	TRACER An optional value to be included in the user agent string. Useful for troubleshooting.
--provider-id/-p	PROVIDER_ID Measure a specific provider and quit
--config-file/-f	CONFIG_FILE Path to a configuration file
--verbose/-v	VERBOSE CONSOLE OUTPUT When no configuration file is specified, used to print detailed output to the screen.
--continuous	RUN MULTIPLE RADAR SESSIONS Causes the client to run Radar sessions continuously with a configurable delay between each session.
--repeat-delay	REPEAT DELAY Used with --continuous to specify the number of seconds to wait before starting the next Radar session. Defaults to 600 seconds (10 minutes)
--max-runs	MAX NUMBER OF SESSIONS Used with --continuous to specify the maximum number of Radar sessions to perform. If unspecified, the process will repeat until terminated.

Configuration File

The tool uses an optional configuration file to setup logging. You may specify the path to this file either using the --config-file/-f command line argument, or by setting the CEDEXIS_RADAR_CONFIG environment variable. The --config-file/-f argument always takes precedence over the environment variable setting.

The configuration file is JSON-formatted. The example below shows how to setup verbose output to a file and reduced output to the console.

{
    "customer": {
        "zone_id": 1,
        "customer_id": 10660
    },
    "logging": {
        "version": 1,
        "disable_existing_loggers": false,
        "formatters": {
            "console_formatter": {
                "format": "%(name)s (%(levelname)s): %(message)s"
            },
            "file_formatter": {
                "format": "%(asctime)s - %(name)s (%(levelname)s): %(message)s"
            }
        },
        "handlers": {
            "console": {
                "class": "logging.StreamHandler",
                "level": "INFO",
                "formatter": "console_formatter"
            },
            "file": {
                "class": "logging.FileHandler",
                "level": "DEBUG",
                "formatter": "file_formatter",
                "filename": "/home/freddy/logs/cedexis.radar.log"
            }
        },
        "root": {
            "level": "DEBUG",
                "handlers": [ "console", "file" ]
        }
    }
}

If you don't pass the --config-file/-f argument and the CEDEXIS_RADAR_CONFIG environment variable is not set, or if you pass the --config-file/-f argument with no value, the script uses default settings. The default settings produce minimal logging to the screen and no file logging.

Unit Tests

It's easy to run the unit test suite using nose. Here's an example for Python 3 on Ubuntu 13.10. It should be simple to adapt this example to other operating systems and versions of Python.

# Make sure you've got nose installed
$ pip3 install nose

# Run tests
$ nosetests --with-xunit

About Cedexis

Founded in 2009, Cedexis optimizes web performance across data centers, content delivery networks (CDNs) and clouds, for companies that want to ensure 100% availability and extend their reach to new global markets.

We provide real-time, data-driven, global traffic management solutions. Optimize clouds, data centers and CDN content delivery to improve the availability, latency and throughput of your website and other Internet-connected apps, for every user on the globe.

Please visit us at www.cedexis.com.