A colleague asked me the other day if it was possible to setup a workstation with just LoadRunner installed and have it automatically carry out a typical user transaction to determine the ‘health’ of the target server. After explaining to him that it would be a clunky approach at best, and currently lacking an installation of HP’s Business Availability Center which could achieve such a thing (Bah, humbug to that) I suggested we write a simple Ruby script, using the ‘watir’ gem which can be periodically called by the existing SiteScope installation.

If you didn’t have SiteScope installed, you could just as easily run this script as a scheduled task within Windows or via cron within a Unix environment, no sweat …