Implementing smoke testing and proactive monitoring in production

How do you know your critical user journeys are working right now? Proactive smoke testing provides the answer.

#1about 3 minutes

Defining smoke testing for critical functionality

Smoke testing provides rapid, cost-effective feedback on critical application functionality by running a wide but shallow set of end-to-end tests.

#2about 5 minutes

The importance of continuous testing in production

Running automated tests continuously against the production environment, not just staging, provides ultimate confidence in site reliability and protects core business workflows.

#3about 8 minutes

Implementing smoke tests in your deployment lifecycle

Integrate smoke tests to run immediately after deployments and at regular intervals using automated, cloud-based solutions for consistent feedback.

#4about 4 minutes

Identifying critical user flows for smoke testing

Focus tests on essential user journeys such as login, registration, adding items to a cart, and verifying both internal and third-party API endpoints.

#5about 4 minutes

Automating web tests with synthetic monitoring

Synthetic monitoring uses automated scripts from global locations to proactively test availability, functionality, and performance before users are impacted.

#6about 15 minutes

Creating availability and performance monitors

Set up basic ping monitors to check endpoint availability and simple browser monitors to capture detailed performance waterfalls for key pages.

#7about 17 minutes

Writing a scripted API test with Node.js

Use a Node.js environment to write custom scripts that make HTTP requests to API endpoints and assert that the responses are valid.

#8about 14 minutes

Simulating user journeys with scripted browser tests

Build end-to-end user simulations with Selenium-based scripts that navigate pages, find elements, and perform actions like clicking buttons.

#9about 6 minutes

Using no-code tools to create test scripts

Accelerate test creation by using a step-by-step builder in the UI or by recording user interactions with the Selenium IDE browser extension.

#10about 6 minutes

Visualizing test results with dashboards and reports

Use a query language like NRQL to build dashboards that track success rates and error types, and configure alert policies to get notified of failures.