Writing a canary script - Amazon CloudWatch
Changing an existing Selenium script to use a Synthetics canary
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Writing a canary script

The following sections explain how to write a canary script and how to integrate a canary with other Amazon Services.

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Changing an existing Selenium script to use a Synthetics canary

You can quickly modify an existing script for Python and Selenium to be used as a canary. For more information about Selenium, see www.selenium.dev/.

For this example, we'll start with the following Selenium script:

from selenium import webdriver

def basic_selenium_script():
    browser = webdriver.Chrome()
    browser.get('https://example.com')
    browser.save_screenshot('loaded.png')

basic_selenium_script()

The conversion steps are as follows.

To convert a Selenium script to be used as a canary

  1. Change the import statement to use Selenium from the aws_synthetics module:

    from aws_synthetics.selenium import synthetics_webdriver as webdriver

    The Selenium module from aws_synthetics ensures that the canary can emit metrics and logs, generate a HAR file, and work with other CloudWatch Synthetics features.

  2. Create a handler function and call your Selenium method. The handler is the entry point function for the script.

    If you are using syn-python-selenium-1.0, the handler function must be named handler. If you are using syn-python-selenium-1.1 or later, the function can have any name, but it must be the same name that is used in the script. Also, if you are using syn-python-selenium-1.1 or later, you can store your scripts under any folder and specify that folder as part of the handler name.

    def handler(event, context):
    basic_selenium_script()

The script is now updated to be a CloudWatch Synthetics canary. Here is the updated script:

from aws_synthetics.selenium import synthetics_webdriver as webdriver

def basic_selenium_script():
    browser = webdriver.Chrome()
    browser.get('https://example.com')
    browser.save_screenshot('loaded.png')

def handler(event, context):
    basic_selenium_script()