Test Logged In Pages

Calibre can log in to protected websites and applications to monitor performance. When you set up authentication for a Site, it will run on all Pages within that Site. This artcle covers several ways of authentication that might suit your needs.

Form Authentication

Calibre can log into your sites and applications as if it was one of your users. Form authentication supports the most common types of single and multi-step log in forms. Two-factor authentication (2FA) is not supported.

1. To enable form-based authentication, navigate to Site → Synthetic → Settings → Authentication.
2. In the Form Authentication section, provide a URL to your login form, username, password and CSS selectors for the form and relevant inputs. If you are logging in using a multi-step form, set the Submit selector to target the submit button used in each step of your form, e.g.: #continue[type=submit], #signInSubmit[type=submit]. Using the example selectors above, Calibre will search for elements matching #continue and #signInSubmit and click the first matching element it finds.
3. Click the Save button.

Allow Calibre Agent IPs

In some cases, authentication might fail even when form-based authentication has been set up correctly. We recommend allowing Calibre Agent IP addresses to ensure Calibre can successfully view your sites and applications.

Basic Authentication

Basic authentication is a simple way to authenticate built into the HTTP protocol. When Calibre Test Agent requests your Site, you can pass credentials in Authorization: Basic <credentials> header. The credentials have to be Base64-encoded.

1. Generate the Base64-encoded username:password string. You can do so in a terminal using the following command:

1echo -n 'username:password' | base64

2. To enable basic authentication, add a header to Agent Settings or a Test Profile with the following format:

• Name: Authorization
• Value: Basic Base64-encoded username:password string

For more information about Authorization headers, see MDN Authorization documentation.

Cookies and Headers

When Form Authentication is not sufficient (for example, in the case of more complex authentication flows, which have confirmation steps), we recommend using Cookies or Headers to authenticate your sites and applications.

You can add authentication to specific Test Profiles, or globally at Test Agent level.

Test Profile Cookies and Headers

Test Profiles allow changing the conditions that your Sites are tested under, including authentication.

1. To add Cookies or Headers to Test Profiles, navigate to Site → Synthetic → Settings → Test Profiles and choose a relevant Test Profile.
2. Click Add a header or Add a cookie button to create a new one, then save the profile information.
3. The Test Agents will use the set Cookie or Header when making requests to your Site.

Test Agent Cookies and Headers

1. To add Cookies or Headers to the Test Agent, navigate to Site → Synthetic → Settings → Test Agent.
2. Click Add a header or Add a cookie button to create a new one, then save it.
3. The Test Agents will use the set Cookie or Header when making requests to your Site.

Dynamically updating Cookies and Headers

You can use the Calibre API to dynamically update Site or Test Profile headers and cookies. If you have a custom authentication method, you can perform authentication steps and then use the API to update Calibre with current credentials.