Today, we've released support for Automatic Proxy Configuration to the User Experience Insight Dashboard. In networks where complex proxy rules are maintained through common Proxy Auto Configuration (PAC) files, we have added support for the Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol (WPAD). Our platform is now able to retrieve the PAC file on the network using WPAD, from a URL or by manually uploading it.
How it Works ?
When a new network (wired or wireless) is created, the network can be assigned a proxy configuration in the advanced settings. This can also be done by editing an existing network.
When the advanced settings are clicked, you will now be able to select either Auto or Manual. Under Auto, there are now three new options
WPAD
PAC URL
Upload PAC file
Let's see how these work.
Auto: WPAD
This option will enable the sensor to use the WPAD procedure to search for the wpad.dat file using the DHCP or DNS methods.
Auto: PAC URL
Using this option you can specify the URL of where the PAC file can be retrieved by the sensor.
Auto: Upload PAC File
If you have the wpad.dat file locally, you can upload it here.
Simply locate it and upload it to configure your proxy settings.
Manual
You can still manually configure proxies and they will be used for all tests that use HTTP or HTTPS.
Things to note
If authentication is required you can configure HTTP Basic Auth using a username and password.
Authentication will be used for all proxies on the network.
Once a proxy has been configured for your network (on the dashboard), it will affect all tests (external and internal) configured for that same network.
If you want to only have certain tests use proxies then you should make sure your PAC file returns the correct proxy (or no proxy) for that particular test's URL.
The device obeys the cache control policy from the PAC URL response header if it is present. If it is not then it is cached for 1 hour. The cache is in memory so if the device reboots the cache state is cleared.
The tests that support proxies are:
HTTP GET
HTTPS GET
DropBox Throughput
YouTube Download
Zap
The following tests will attempt to run if set up but they don't explicitly support proxies:
iPerf2
iPerf3
Telnet
ICMP and TCP pings (including pings included in the predefined web server test):
If you have enabled a proxy on your network, the sensor will by default not attempt to do ICMP and TCP ping. Enable the Force ICMP pings and Force TCP pings options to override this behaviour.
See all that's new...
For all User Experience Insight updates, see our updates page, otherwise get started with these new features today.