Test Agent Settings

The Test agent is the synthetic browser that we use to visit your pages and run Lighthouse reports with.

In most cases the default settings are perfect for monitoring your site, but in some cases it make sense to be able to adjust how it works. In this page we'll describe all the ways you can configure the agent.

Location

You can choose between 11 different geographical locations you want the agent to run from. It makes most sense to choose a location where most of your real traffic come from so you don't introduce artificially long latency because the test agent is too far away from where your website is hosted.

These are the locations you can choose from.

Our test agents are running on Google Cloud Platform.

Frequency

If you don't want to only test your pages once every night, use this setting to adjust the frequency of the tests. The more you test, the less variance you get in your tests, making the test results more precise and reliable.

Cookies

If you want to set one or more cookies in the test agent browser, use the Cookies feature. It lets you set as many cookies as you want.

One of the main use cases of cookies is to set a "consent cookie" that shows your cookie consent provider that you have in fact either accepted all cookies, or rejected them.

Form authentication

If you want to monitor the pages behind a login form, use the Form authentication panel. ...

HTTP Headers

In some rare cases you may want to control the HTTP headers used in the request to your website. Maybe you're testing a non-public website that requires a custom HTTP Header before it can be viewed. In that case, add the HTTP headers in this format, separated by a line break:

name=value

An example:

X-Test-agent=PageVitals

Note that any existing HTTP headers (such as the User-Agent) will be overwritten.