Stop paying for luxury monitoring

Luxury Monitoring: Not Always Justifiable for Small Businesses

Advanced monitoring solutions offer detailed visibility into application performance but come with high costs and complexities. For small and medium-sized businesses, these tools can be hard to justify. Despite significant investments, many still face alerting inefficiencies and gaps in monitoring.

Teams often get overwhelmed by the data these tools generate, making it difficult to set up effective alerts. This undermines the value of the system, leading to wasted resources and high expenses.

Key Challenges Include:

1. High Costs: Advanced tools using tracing, deep instrumentations and extensive logging are expensive. They require significant spending on licenses, maintenance, and specialized staff. Plus, you need big budgets for compute, storage, and network costs to handle all the data.
2. Complexity with Alerts: Setting up and maintaining these tools is complicated. Identifying the right metrics, determining the right thresholds for alerts is tricky — too many false alarms can overwhelm your team and even lead to burnout.
3. Overkill for Small Operations: For small businesses, these tools often provide more data than necessary. The scale and scope of their operations usually don’t justify such in-depth monitoring.

By simplifying their monitoring approach, small businesses can avoid these pitfalls and focus on more practical solutions.

The Power of Synthetic Monitoring for Small Businesses

For small businesses, having the right level of monitoring from an end-user perspective is crucial. Synthetic monitoring provides this by simulating real user interactions with your web application or API endpoints. Here’s why synthetic monitoring is a game-changer:

1. Focus on Critical Paths: Monitor only your essential business transactions 24/7, just like a real user would. When issues arise, meaningful alerts are triggered with detailed information on the failure.
2. Cost-Effective: Synthetic monitoring is affordable and perfect for small businesses operating on tight budgets. It provides reliable performance tracking without the high costs of deep monitoring solutions.
3. Simple and Efficient: Setting up synthetic monitoring is straightforward and doesn’t require extensive infrastructure. It’s accessible for businesses without a dedicated IT team. Plus, you can easily correlate synthetic monitoring alerts with your existing log systems and dashboards, making it easier to pinpoint issues.
4. Proactive Issue Detection: By continuously simulating user interactions, synthetic monitoring catches problems early. Sometimes even problems in the last mile connectivity. With tests running every 1–5 minutes, you can detect and address issues before they impact real users. This means minimal disruption and quick resolution. For example, if login failures occur, your team knows it’s time for immediate action.

Synthetic monitoring offers a practical and efficient way for small businesses to ensure their applications run smoothly, providing a seamless experience for users and peace of mind for the team.

Leveraging Open Source Agents for Synthetic Monitoring

One of the most significant advantages of synthetic monitoring is the availability of open-source agents, such as those based on Playwright.

https://playwright.dev/
https://github.com/microsoft/playwright

Playwright example test

A brief walk through of steps needed here.

1. Install playwright in your server. https://playwright.dev/docs/intro#installing-playwright

2. Playwright makes it easy to test web endpoints or webpages by simulating user interactions. There are even recorders available which can auto-generate this script based on your browser manual actions. Here’s a brief example of a Playwright script in JavaScript that opens a webpage and asserts a few key elements.

Example web page test script

3. Now, you can extend this to even multi-page tests to simulate real user actions like type, click etc., The results can be captured as a report json/html with the exact page/element that caused the failure. :)

playwright test report

4. Imagine, you having this playwright test run every 5 mins from one of your servers and the report analysed for failures. On detection of a failure in the report, trigger an alert to your slack or your pagerduty api endpoint to create an incident.

Note : The good news is that, playwright offers automatic retries and also screenshot and state capture capabilities. This means your incidents can not just have a title but also clear actionable content.

Set this up across your key business flows.. take a deep breath.. now you can relax !

Playwright is a powerful tool for automating web & API testing and can be effectively utilized for synthetic monitoring. You also have more options like selenium, puppeteer. Here’s how open-source agents like playwright can enhance synthetic monitoring:

1. Affordability: Open-source solutions eliminate licensing costs, making them an attractive option for small businesses. With tools like Playwright, businesses can set up comprehensive synthetic monitoring without incurring significant expenses.
2. Flexibility and Customization: Open-source agents offer flexibility and can be tailored to meet specific monitoring needs. Playwright, for instance, allows businesses to write custom scripts to simulate various user interactions, providing a high degree of customisation.
3. Community Support: Open-source tools benefit from active community support. Businesses can leverage community resources, documentation, and forums to troubleshoot issues and enhance their monitoring setup.
4. Integration with CI/CD Pipelines: Open-source agents can be seamlessly integrated into CI/CD pipelines, allowing businesses to automate testing and monitoring as part of their development workflow across environments.

Conclusion

For small businesses, synthetic monitoring is the best value-for-money solution for ensuring application performance and availability. Unlike costly and complex luxury monitoring options like tracing and deep logging, synthetic monitoring is affordable and easy to implement. By using open-source tools like Playwright, businesses can proactively detect issues and maintain a seamless user experience without straining their budgets. Synthetic monitoring is a practical and efficient choice for reliable and affordable monitoring.