Let's talk about Synthetic Monitoring

Lately i've been exploring other ways a quality engineering team can contribute towards quality. One of those ways is termed Synthetic Monitoring.

With the use of Data Dog you are able to create browser and API tests without the need for any infrastructure to execute those tests. SO SIMPLE. I love when testing is made easy.

My mission was to eliminate threat zero. Meaning if any of the websites are down in production, I want to know about it and be alerted.

So that's what I did. Data Dog offers you both a browser and api test option. The browser option is similar to that of selenium ide (a record and play test) and the api is that similar to postman. It's effective - and I don't have to worry about two more tools. I can just focus on creating tests.

It's brilliant. Data Dog has 3 element locator options, one in their in built element locator, then an additional option to provide a css/xpath locator. I find that this still needs a lot more work and the usual css and xpath locator which usually work in selenium aren't that reliable in Data Dog. I'm unsure if this is due to the many dynamic elements in the websites. But on that note, data dog is missing the functionality to test the css & xpath locator.

I've reached out to a Data Dog rep to see if they can help guide me to write more reliable tests. Toodles for now!