synthetic-monitoring

SKILL.md

Synthetic Monitoring

Table of Contents

Overview

When to Use

Quick Start

Reference Guides

Best Practices

Overview

Set up synthetic monitoring to automatically simulate real user journeys, API workflows, and critical business transactions to detect issues and validate performance.

When to Use

End-to-end workflow validation

API flow testing

User journey simulation

Transaction monitoring

Critical path validation

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

// synthetic-tests.js
const { chromium } = require("playwright");

class SyntheticMonitor {
  constructor(config = {}) {
    this.baseUrl = config.baseUrl || "https://app.example.com";
    this.timeout = config.timeout || 30000;
  }

  async testUserFlow() {
    const browser = await chromium.launch();
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    const metrics = { steps: {} };
    const startTime = Date.now();

    try {
      // Step 1: Navigate to login
      let stepStart = Date.now();
      await page.goto(`${this.baseUrl}/login`, { waitUntil: "networkidle" });
      metrics.steps.navigation = Date.now() - stepStart;

      // Step 2: Perform login
      stepStart = Date.now();
      await page.fill('input[name="email"]', "test@example.com");
      await page.fill('input[name="password"]', "password123");
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide
Contents

Synthetic Tests with Playwright
Synthetic Tests with Playwright

API Synthetic Tests
API Synthetic Tests

Scheduled Synthetic Monitoring
Scheduled Synthetic Monitoring

Best Practices

✅ DO

Test critical user journeys

Simulate real browser conditions

Monitor from multiple locations

Track response times

Alert on test failures

Rotate test data

Test mobile and desktop

Include error scenarios

❌ DON'T

Test with production data

Reuse test accounts

Skip timeout configurations

Ignore test maintenance

Test too frequently

Hard-code credentials

Ignore geographic variations

Test only happy paths

1d:[