Deepak Koul

Topic: Building a distributed synthetic monitoring system with Puppeteer and Jenkins

Abstract: Synthetic monitoring is a part of the ‘Testing in production’ movement which is gathering steam in our software industry. It gives you the ability to monitor your APIs and web applications continuously in different geographical locations. This data then can be used to create your performance tuning strategies. Modern synthetic monitoring is not just about availability (whether your application or an API endpoint is up or not) but it is more about reliability ( Is certain geo showing performance degradation which can nudge your customers to competitors).

In this 90 minute lab, I am going to show how to build a distributed synthetic monitor very easily using -
a) Puppeteer: Google-backed browser automation tool using devtools protocol.
b) Jenkins: Famous CI tool used by organizations to build and schedule jobs.
Every tool and technology used in this lab is open source and hence everyone can straightaway start using this setup. Attendees can not only use this setup to monitor their applications but also use the data generated by this setup overtime to do performance analysis and draw tuning strategies. And an interesting by-product of the whole setup is that you can always put your pre-prod environments on monitoring and every time your QA or Stage environment is down, you will be notified and hence you get a nice control over the stability of your testing environments in this continuous integration era.