The Web Application Editor in System Center Essentials 2010 can be used to capture navigation through one or more Web sites. In the Web Application Editor, you can interactively record a sequence of actions on a Web site or you can manually create a set of requests that monitor the Web site. This sequence of requests creates a synthetic transaction (sometimes known as a robotic transaction, or robot) that can be played back at regular intervals to provide information about how your Web site is performing. Note that these transactions are actual transactions. For example, if you have one transaction that transfers money from one bank account to another, you might want to create a second transaction that transfers the money back to the original account.
The capture Web site navigation feature intercepts traffic between Internet Explorer and the Web site and captures all HTTP request data, such as headers and body text. This feature also sets defaults for monitoring criteria to match the captured data. For instance, if during capture a Web server reports status code 404 for a request, the MP Configuration Wizard defaults to expecting a 404 status code for that request. These defaults can be changed by editing the object.
It is generally easy to create requests by capturing them using the recording feature. However, in some instances you might want to customize requests with additional tags or properties or add additional requests that you manually create. For example, you might want to manually add tags to identify the transaction as an Essentials 2007 transaction instead of a user transaction.