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testRTC June 2020 Release Notes

Facelift

We are starting another round of UI facelift. As we grow and have more products, we want to make sure every user finds his way around testRTC without confusion. And it is becoming a bit challenging 🤔

As a first round, we decided to rollout a new sidebar menu, to group our products into 3 categories: Testing, Monitoring and Support

Next rounds will see more significant changes. If you have comments or suggestions – let us know.

Testing & Monitoring

APIs

  • Assets now have a few new APIs. These make it a lot simpler to connect assets to your git development lifecycle:
    • POST /assets – when creating an asset will now return its asset ID
    • GET /assets – new API to get a listing of all assets in the project
    • GET /assets/{assetId} – new API to get the contents of an asset
  • New usage API allows you programmatic access to your project’s use
    • GET /usage – currently supports qualityRTC usage metrics. We intend to expand this to all other products
  • Fixed a nasty bug around getting the list of tests (it returned only 2)

Script Commands: Expectations

  • Events based expectations is now available
    • You can now decide to check if audio or video are muted after you’ve intentionally clicked a mute button; or that bitrate has gone back up after fiddling around with the network conditions
    • This has been long awaited so we’ll be happy to see what you make of it
  • rtcSetTestExpectations can now check for video resolution and score values as well

VNC

  • VNC is disabled by default for monitoring. The VNC server takes up ports and resources, so we simply don’t run it where we don’t have to. If you need it for debugging a specific session, you can now use #force-vnc run option

qualityRTC: Network Testing

New Features

  • New premium feature: IP insights
    • When we lookup the location of an IP address, we can now tell you with good accuracy if your user is running a VPN or similar service
    • On top of that, we can estimate if he is sitting in a hotel, coffee shop, office or home
    • All these insights are now available as a premium option to qualityRTC
  • New test widget: DNS Lookup
    • You can now give us a list of HTTPS and WSS addresses to check connectivity to
    • This will make it a lot easier to understand if the user needs to whitelist any specific domains in his firewall that he might have missed
    • Check out more here: https://testrtc.com/docs/dns-lookup-what-we-measure/
  • New silent test: ping
    • The ping test can now also run silently
    • In this mode, it collects the information and places it in the logs, but won’t display any widget
    • This leaves room on the screen for other, more important tests if needed
  • New silent test: browser filtering
    • We now run a browser type and version check
    • The information is placed in the log for easy access
    • You can decide to block access to the test from certain browsers (for example if your service doesn’t support that browser at all)
  • New silent test: video playback
    • There are some nasty Chrome extensions that won’t let WebRTC playback its media
    • We can check against that in advance as part of the tests we run
  • New silent test: getUserMedia
    • Run a dedicated getUserMedia check
    • This enables you to check camera and microphone accessibility separately from the tests conducted on the page itself
  • New silent test: collect local storage
    • We can now collect local storage data
    • This is useful if you are running qualityRTC in its SDK mode and have local storage that might be useful for your debugging

Improvements

  • The logs have been reformatted and made easy to read, making them a lot more usable
  • qualityRTC now shows the date and time a test was conducted when you open a test conducted from the dashboard
  • Improved failure messages when the user’s IP is unknown
  • For those with a workflow requiring an email prior to running a test, we now show better error messages to the users
  • We’re continuing to improve the new analytics dashboard we introduced in our last release. This is an ongoing process, so expect more polishes in the future as well
  • The progress bar now runs a bit smoother and shows a better estimate of the time it will take to conduct the test
  • Fixed a bug where when bandwidth speed test wasn’t available the test got stuck – we now proceed failing on that specific test

probeRTC: Zero install network probes

  • When a probe stops running we now send an email alerting of that situation so you can take action. You will also receive an email when the situation is back to normal
  • The last result data has been moved from the main viewing area towards an internal page, clickable from the top of the view. The reason for that is that our clients said they are more interested in the graphs than the specifics of the last run, so we made sure graphs now show up above the fold:
  • We are now able to customize the probe’s look and feel, so when you send the link to your users to run on their browsers, they will see your branding
  • When looking at the graph results for a probe, you can now zoom the view by dragging your mouse on the graph. The cool thing is that all other charts will synchronize on that view as well

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