Test Center

Overview

Your web properties are mission-critical for your business, yet every configuration change has the potential to break them. Akamai's Test Center is a new and unique testing tool that improves the safety of your configuration changes.

Test Center uses a browser to make both production and pre-production requests for the same URL and then compares the responses of the objects that are returned. It highlights any differences that it finds in the results of the two requests.

You can review these changes and accept the ones which are expected, and investigate the ones which are not expected. As the number of unexpected differences decreases, you’ll get better confidence in the safety of the proposed changes in the configurations, post-activation.

Test Center doesn’t replace any form of unit testing; the goal of this tool is to make sure that it’s safe to push your configuration changes, and that nothing will break when the new changes take effect.

Infographic depicting ATC steps

Key Benefits of Test Center

  • Test config changes in real time: Compare the behavior of a live, user-facing site with another one that has your new configuration changes.

  • Manage test definitions: Use roles and control settings to create, configure or remove definitions for yourself, your team members, or your organization.

  • View insightful reports: For any given test definition, you can view the progress, results, and the individual differences discovered by it, to take certain actions, such as accepting a difference or adding a note to it.

Using Test Center In Your Testing Process

Test Center is primarily designed with the Property Manager use case in mind, but it also works for testing changes to other types of configurations, as long as the main delivery configuration is in Akamai Property Manager.

A good way to explain how Test Center can fit within your own testing is to look at a typical workflow:

  1. Make changes to your Akamai configuration settings, activate them, and run unit tests on each change.
  2. Use Test Center to test definitions associated with each of the hostnames impacted by the configuration changes.
  3. Review the Test Center test results, accept the desirable differences, and fix the problems indicated by undesirable results.
  4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 to identify and accept all desirable changes. Please note these are the only two additional steps added to your standard workflow. 
  5. Perform other forms of testing (e.g., functional, integration, etc.) using your existing process.
  6. Activate all final changes to production.

Getting Started with Test Center

  1. Log into Akamai's Control Center at control.akamai.com.
  2. From the main menu, click Configure.
  3. Under the Property Manager section, click Test Center.
  4. Create and configure a test definition and case.
  5. Run the tests and view the results.
  6. Accept the differences.

For details on how to create and run a new test definition, see the Test a configuration change overview in the Test Center documentation.

Automating Testing Using the Test Center API

You can also access Test Center using the Test Center API, which allows you to integrate Test Center into your automated test and DevOps workflows. The Test Center API lets you do the following:

  • Create a test definition
  • Add a test case to a test definition
  • Run a test definition
  • Access test results
  • Accept differences in the results after analyzing the test results
  • Add notes for the obtained differences

Additional Resources

Test Center Documentation

Test Center API