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# Proactive monitoring and smoke testing in your production environment

Are your unit tests missing critical production failures? Learn how automated smoke testing and synthetic monitoring catch broken workflows before your users ever notice.

- **Speakers:** Liam Hurrel
- **Event:** WeAreDevelopers LIVE
- **Published:** May 12, 2021
- **Duration:** 1:27:59
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/139-proactive-monitoring-and-smoke-testing-in-your-production-environment

## Summary

Traditional pre-deployment unit and integration tests often leave a critical visibility gap, exposing production environments to unforeseen breakages where features like logins might work, but core workflows completely fail over the weekend. Automated smoke testing and proactive monitoring solve this by allowing teams to continuously validate build verification and user journeys directly against staging or live production instances. By executing fast, parallel checks immediately after deploying new code, developers and DevOps teams gain the confidence needed to ensure global site availability and operational stability without waiting for user-reported errors.

To achieve this deployment confidence, teams can leverage automated synthetic monitoring platforms like New Relic Synthetics alongside tools such as Node.js and Selenium WebDriver. This approach allows organizations to configure a spectrum of automated checks, from simple global network pings and page load benchmarking to highly complex, scripted API interactions and full-browser simulated user paths. Using browser extensions like the Selenium Chrome IDE, teams can easily record and scaffold complex end-to-end user navigation scripts, drastically reducing the manual coding needed to test dynamic UI elements or validate core cart checkout systems.

Successfully implementing these practices requires more than just running scripts; it demands securely managing test variables and effectively surfacing the results. Built-in secure credential storage keeps simulated login accounts out of test logs, while deploying private test locations allows for the verification of secure internal endpoints limitlessly. Ultimately, transforming these continuous synthetic test results into custom NRQL dashboards, automated SLA reports, and tightly coupled alerting policies ensures technical teams rapidly visualize failure states and triage performance regressions before they ever impact the end customer.

**Keywords:** proactive monitoring, automated smoke testing, production environment testing, synthetic monitoring, selenium webdriver scripting, node.js test automation, continuous deployment validation, build verification testing, user journey simulation, API endpoint validation, global ping monitors, page load benchmarking, selenium chrome IDE, SLA reporting dashboards, incident alerting policies, secure credential storage, post-deployment confidence, NRQL data visualization

## Chapters

1. **Introduction to proactive monitoring and workshop overview** (00:16) — Accessing the initial lab environment properly grounds participants to explore real-time observability principles.
1. **Defining smoke testing for production system environments** (08:04) — Running rapid end-to-end verifications validates core application functionality entirely over traditional full regression cycles.
1. **Optimal timing for continuous smoke test execution** (13:10) — Executing test coverage directly after staging deployments aggressively isolates latent application regressions early.
1. **Test automation strategies and essential workflow use cases** (16:54) — Simulating fundamental interface functions like cart checkouts validates application integrity while uncovering third-party dependency failures.
1. **Utilizing synthetic monitors for automated scheduled testing** (22:27) — Adopting cloud-hosted automation environments allows predictable scheduling metrics for targeted site latency measurements.
1. **Configuring ping checks and simple browser load monitors** (27:05) — Programming recurrent ping checks effectively audits web resolution speeds directly from distributed geographical global network nodes.
1. **Scripting API tests for backend component endpoint verification** (38:50) — Writing customized node scripts triggers asynchronous network requests to explicitly validate backend system response codes.
1. **Developing scripted browser automated site navigation routines** (53:03) — Connecting promise-based interactions directly maps complex procedural sequences ensuring standard page loading resolves correctly.
1. **Generating browser automated scripts utilizing test recording environments** (62:28) — Extending browser extensions to auto-generate underlying validation sequences dramatically accelerates custom user journey simulations.
1. **Visualizing test stability using service level agreement dashboards** (77:12) — Integrating data aggregation queries isolates infrastructure defects rapidly providing broad team transparency regarding failure rates.
1. **Configuring failure alerts and automated workflow integration channels** (85:10) — Building specified incident routing securely transmits outage logs to primary messaging interfaces immediately during disruption events.

## Related Moments

- [Defining the methodology behind smoke testing in production](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/171-implementing-smoke-testing-and-proactive-monitoring-in-production) (from "Implementing smoke testing and proactive monitoring in production")
- [Implementing automated monitoring and end-to-end testing](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/962-3-key-steps-for-optimizing-devops-workflows) (from "3 Key Steps for Optimizing DevOps Workflows")
- [Automating security and performance evaluations during the testing phase](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/598-why-shifting-left-is-so-important-for-software-developers) (from "Why shifting left is so important for software developers")
- [Implementing automated synthetic monitors for web applications](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/171-implementing-smoke-testing-and-proactive-monitoring-in-production) (from "Implementing smoke testing and proactive monitoring in production")
- [Classifying performance testing into proactive and passive strategies](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/8-frontend-performance-testing-in-practice) (from "Frontend Performance Testing in practice")
- [Monitoring and automation as production testing safeguards](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/949-progressive-delivery-in-kubernetes) (from "Progressive Delivery in Kubernetes")

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