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What Is BrowserBot?

ThousandEyes Virtual Appliances are shipped with both the Enterprise Agent and BrowserBot components enabled. When installing the ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent as a Linux package on a supported operating system, you have the option to install BrowserBot, by passing the -b flag to the installation script.

What Is BrowserBot?

The BrowserBot is a component of the agent code that manages page load and transaction tests. This is accomplished through running an instance of the Chromium browser.

On the other hand, HTTP Server tests are using a custom version of cURL library under the hood and therefore do not need the BrowserBot installed.

BrowserBot Subnet IP Ranges

BrowserBot reserves selected IP ranges exclusively for its own use. These IP ranges cannot be monitored externally if BrowserBot is enabled:

Platform
Subnet Range

Podman: te-browserbot-dual-stack

  • 10.88.2.0/28 (IPv4)

  • fd15:cda9:2fb8:eaf9::/64 (IPv6)

Podman: te-browserbot-ipv4

  • 10.88.2.16/28 (IPv4)

If Browserbot is enabled on an agent, all test types are impacted, not just BrowserBot tests.

Can I Install BrowserBot onto an Existing Enterprise Agent?

Yes. To install the BrowserBot component on an existing Enterprise Agent that does not already have it installed, simply re-run the installation script, including your ThousandEyes Account Group token, and the -b flag:

sudo ./install_thousandeyes.sh -b {your account group token}

This will install the BrowserBot and all required dependencies. The BrowserBot version information will now appear in the Enterprise Agent's General Info panel in the Network & App Synthetics > Agent Settings page, as per the image below:

Additional Hardware Resource Requirements

When you install the BrowserBot package on an agent, it requires additional memory. Consult the Enterprise Agent hardware requirements for full details.

Podman Version Compatibility for Linux Distributions

If you are deploying your Enterprise Agent with a Linux distribution, it is important to note that Browserbot is not compatible with Podman v5.0.0 or higher. The table below highlights the compatible Podman versions for different Browserbot versions.

BrowserBot Version
Compatible Podman Version

BrowserBot v3.6.0 or higher

Podman v4.9.4

BrowserBot v3.5.0 or lower

Podman v4.4.4

Which Version of Chromium Is BrowserBot Using?

There are two methods of determining the Chromium version used:

Method 1 - Inspecting HTTP Headers in Waterfall

Pick any Page Load or Transaction test that has headers collection enabled. Open the results view, select one of the agents, switch to the Waterfall tab and click on one of the entries' Headers link:

Once there, open the Request Headers tab and search for the user-agent (or User-Agent if HTTP protocol version 1.1 was used) header:

Notice the browser version specified in the specified request header.

Method 2 - Inspecting the Installed Package Version

Once you have connected to the agent's SSH console, a simple command suggests the version of Chromium browser used under the hood. For connecting to the SSH console of appliances, we have guides available for Windows and OS X / Linux workstation operating systems.

For Ubuntu-based operating systems (including ThousandEyes Virtual Appliances), use the following command:

For RHEL/CentOS/Oracle Linux systems, use the following:

The commands above will return the name of the package installed and by naming convention that is the version of the browser installed. In the example above, the browser version is 68.0.3440.83 - the -1 suffix is not part of the browser version information - it is a package release number.

Related Information

The following resources provide further information about related subjects:

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