Liam Hurrel

Proactive monitoring and smoke testing in your production environment

Stop waiting for users to report bugs. Learn to automate end-to-end smoke tests in production and deploy with total confidence.

Proactive monitoring and smoke testing in your production environment
#1about 8 minutes

Introduction to proactive monitoring and smoke testing

An overview of the session's goals, tools, and the fundamental questions that smoke testing aims to answer for developers and DevOps teams.

#2about 5 minutes

Defining smoke testing for core functionality

Smoke testing provides quick, end-to-end feedback on core application functionality and performance immediately after a deployment.

#3about 4 minutes

Determining the right time to run smoke tests

Run smoke tests after fresh deployments and at regular intervals in both staging and production to ensure continuous confidence in your application's stability.

#4about 2 minutes

Comparing manual and automated smoke testing approaches

Automated, cloud-hosted solutions provide a scalable framework for running tests on a schedule and integrating results with observability platforms.

#5about 3 minutes

Practical use cases for smoke testing applications

Common smoke tests validate critical user workflows like registration, login, adding items to a cart, and ensuring essential API endpoints are responsive.

#6about 5 minutes

Using New Relic Synthetics for automated testing

New Relic Synthetics provides different monitor types like Ping, Simple Browser, Scripted Browser, and API tests to cover availability, functionality, and performance.

#7about 12 minutes

Creating Ping and Simple Browser monitors for basic checks

A walkthrough of setting up a Ping monitor to check URL availability and a Simple Browser monitor to benchmark page load performance from multiple locations.

#8about 12 minutes

Building a scripted API test for endpoint validation

A live coding demonstration shows how to write a Node.js-based script to make HTTP requests to an API endpoint and assert the response status code.

#9about 12 minutes

Developing a scripted browser test for user journeys

Learn to write a Selenium-based script that automates a real Chrome browser to navigate a website, click links, and validate a complete user workflow.

#10about 14 minutes

Using the Selenium IDE to record browser test scripts

A demonstration of the Selenium IDE Chrome extension shows how to record user interactions on a website and export them as a script for automated testing.

#11about 11 minutes

Reporting and alerting on synthetic monitor results

Use SLA reports, custom dashboards with NRQL, and alert policies to visualize test performance over time and receive notifications for any failures.

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From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Test Analyst

Test Analyst

Proactive.IT Appointments Ltd.
Ashford, United Kingdom

Remote
£32-35K
API
HTML
Java
+2