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Test Execution Specialist Guide
This guide describes tasks that you must complete before you can configure and run tests in Rational® Test Automation Server. You can find information about other tasks that you can perform on the Resource Monitoring Service, Virtualization, and Integrations with third-party applications. This guide is intended for testers or test execution specialists.
Resource Monitoring service
When you apply load to a system under test, the amount of resources consumed by your system is increasing. If the capacity of the resources does not match the load, you can see performance issues in the results. The Resource Monitoring service in Rational® Test Automation Server helps you monitoring the resources of a system and establish the performance metrics of the system. Thus, you can observe the health of these resources while a schedule is running.
Resource Monitoring agents
You can connect agents to the Resource Monitoring service from other hosts to monitor a larger set of data collectors, computers, servers, or systems, or if a server to monitor requires authorization access. To monitor these remote servers, you must configure and run the agents so that a connection is set between IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server Resource Monitoring service and the agents.

Test Execution Specialist Guide
This guide describes tasks that you must complete before you can configure and run tests in Rational® Test Automation Server. You can find information about other tasks that you can perform on the Resource Monitoring Service, Virtualization, and Integrations with third-party applications. This guide is intended for testers or test execution specialists.
- Prerequisites to running tests
  Before you can configure and run a test in a project on Rational® Test Automation Server, you must read the information about the different tests. You might want to add a remote static agent or a remote Docker host to the project as an alternate location to run the tests.
- Agents overview
  You can find information about the agents that you must install on remote computers and configure the agents with the offline user token so that the agents register with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server. After the agents are registered, you can add them to your projects and then select them as locations to run tests.
- Managing Docker hosts
  You can set up dedicated external Docker hosts to run large tests or run tests remotely to free up the dependency of running tests on the default cluster of IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server.
- Test run configurations
  You can configure and run tests in IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server after you add the test resources to your project.
- Management of running tests
  Find information about the tasks that you can perform on a test that you configured for a run either while it runs or after it completes the run.
- Management of virtualized services
  You can find information about the tasks that you can perform on and manage the virtualized services that run on Rational® Test Automation Server. You can start or stop the stubs connected to Rational Test Automation Server. You can view the stub usage statistics and the routing rules configured for the stubs, agents, or proxies that are connected to Rational Test Automation Server.
- Test results
  After the tests or schedules are run and completed, you can view the results and reports in IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server to analyze the verdict, the performance, and statistics. You can also re-execute tests and schedules from the Result page with the same commit id.
- Resource Monitoring service
  When you apply load to a system under test, the amount of resources consumed by your system is increasing. If the capacity of the resources does not match the load, you can see performance issues in the results. The Resource Monitoring service in Rational® Test Automation Server helps you monitoring the resources of a system and establish the performance metrics of the system. Thus, you can observe the health of these resources while a schedule is running.
  - Resource monitoring capabilities
    With Rational® Test Automation Server, you can monitor a host or a service that you add to a project as a source. You can select the statistics counters that are used to collect metrics and the resource usage data throughout the monitoring system. You can visualize metrics and data that are gathered during the monitoring process in Rational Test Automation Server.
  - Resource Monitoring agents
    You can connect agents to the Resource Monitoring service from other hosts to monitor a larger set of data collectors, computers, servers, or systems, or if a server to monitor requires authorization access. To monitor these remote servers, you must configure and run the agents so that a connection is set between IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server Resource Monitoring service and the agents.
    - Installing Resource Monitoring agents on remote hosts
      You must install the Resource Monitoring agents on the target host for which you want to monitor the performance statistics. You need to run the agents to establish a connection with the Resource Monitoring service.
    - Starting a Resource Monitoring agent as a service on Windows
      To ensure that the Resource Monitoring agent starts by itself when the host is running, you can set up the environment in such a way that the Resource Monitoring agent can be started as a service.
    - Starting a Resource Monitoring agent as a service on Linux
      To ensure that the Resource Monitoring agent starts by itself when the host is restarted, you can set up the environment in such a way that the Resource Monitoring agent can be started as a service.
    - Starting a Java Virtual Machine
      To monitor the Resource Monitoring data from a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), you must first start the JVM. You must enter the IP address of the JVM, the IP port, and the security parameters in the command before running the Java Virtual Machine.
- Integration with Jira as a defect management system
  You can integrate Jira as a defect management system with your project on IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server to create defects for the tests that are available in the project after the test run is complete.
- Integrating with other applications
  You can integrate certain applications with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server to run tests, view the test results, and create defects.
- Managing access to the server
  Desktop clients and third-party integrations use offline user tokens to connect to Rational® Test Automation Server.

Resource Monitoring agents

You can connect agents to the Resource Monitoring service from other hosts to monitor a larger set of data collectors, computers, servers, or systems, or if a server to monitor requires authorization access. To monitor these remote servers, you must configure and run the agents so that a connection is set between IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server Resource Monitoring service and the agents.

For testing, you would need many hosts. For example, you might have one host with the application server, another host with the database server, and some hosts to apply the user load. Due to network or firewall issues, sometimes, it becomes difficult for multiple hosts to connect to each other. Resource Monitoring agents are installed on the target hosts so that they can establish a connection with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server to gather resource statistics of the target host.

The agents always try to connect with the server through the HTTPS protocol. You must install the agent and start it. From the Resource Monitoring service page in IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server, you can copy the command lines to download files and to run the agents. When you stop the agent, the monitoring sources that you have already added persist but the live data will not be available.

You can configure your Resource Monitoring agent as a service so that the agent automatically runs when the host is restarted. For details, see the documentation pages about starting Resource Monitoring agents on Windows or Linux.

When the agent is connected to IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server, it is added to the main page of the Resource Monitoring service.

view of total and type of sources, agents added to a project

To monitor your host across the agent, you must add the agent as a monitoring source and select performance counters to monitor as described in Monitoring host resources help page.