Selenium for Availability Monitoring

My company monitors performance and availability of websites and mobile applications via functional testing in the cloud; we're looking to expand our technology to include Selenium tests. We use RoR systems to remotely run our functional tests intermittently from a number locations save the data in mysql for reporting/alerting purposes.

We anticipate including Selenium RC on each of our monitoring servers to execute remote tests. We may evolve to running tests from multiple machines in each location (i.e. different flavors of OS, or for scalability purposes).

Since we already ha开发者_Go百科ve a controller for managing the runs of our tests in various locations, so would Grid would be overkill or a necessity?

Any other suggestions?

Well, the Grid does not actually manage (as in schedule) the different runs of tests, it is just a collection of Remote Controls (RCs) connected to a Hub which distributes the tests amongst the machines running the different RCs when their execution is requested.

As for scalability, if you mean stress load testing, then I suggest a different tool (something like JMeter), it could be done with Selenium but it'd require a great number of RCs connecting to the same server which could probably require several machines running many RCs each. RCs are kinda resource heavy if you need many of them (you will for stress testing).

Running different OSs and browsers from various locations should be no problem though, as long as you specify relevant profiles for each, I'd say that this would be the best/main use for Selenium (other than regression testing during development).

Overall, I'd say it's worth it to put up a Grid and RCs in each of your servers, though you can probably manage using a single hub (and thus a single Grid) and having all RCs connect to it.