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Test Execution Specialist guide
This guide, which is intended for a tester or a test execution specialist, describes tasks that you must complete before you can configure and run tests on 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.
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, which is intended for a tester or a test execution specialist, describes tasks that you must complete before you can configure and run tests on 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.
- 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.
- 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 internal Docker host 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 and manage on 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.
  - Monitoring metrics exposed by an OpenMetrics exporter
    With Rational® Test Automation Server, you can monitor your system resources by using metrics data that are exposed by an OpenMetrics or a Prometheus exporter through metric counters while executing a schedule.
  - Monitoring metrics collected by a Prometheus server
    You can monitor your system resources by using metrics data that are collected by a Prometheus server while executing a schedule.
  - Monitoring host resources
    To monitor host resources, you must add the monitoring sources to the Resource Monitoring service, enter connection settings and select performance counters that are used to capture the performance statistics.
  - 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.
    - Connecting agents to the Resource Monitoring service
      You must install the Resource Monitoring agents on the target host for which you want to monitor the performance statistics. The agents must be run to establish a connection with the Resource Monitoring service.
    - Starting a RM 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 RM 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, you must first start the Java Virtual Machine. Some parameters must be set in the command before running the Java Virtual Machine.
- Integrating with other applications
  You can integrate certain applications with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server to run tests and view the test results.
- 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.

When the agent is connected to IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server, it is added to the main page of the Resource Monitoring service. Then, you have to add the agent as a monitoring source and select performance counters to monitor.