Monitoring live site critical paths

[Kamil Szewczyk]

Hi all,

I would like to introduce some kind of automated tests to make sure that critical paths on our clients websites are working. Path like signing up, or checkout process.

I'm aware of Selenium tests which would be ideal to do any automated tests, however I'm not sure how will that work with live websites.

Obviously, there's a lot of integrations with third party systems when goes to checkout - warehouses, payments, customers and so on.

So the problem with running such tests on live sites will cause mutliple problems:

1. Will change stock for products without really needing to.

2. Will need real credit card data with real funds

3. Will create multiple orders in admin, all of which will be tests - will need to be refunded, should be passed to any of the integrations.

How would you suggest doing that? We could of course just check if the checkout is loading, but I have a feeling that it might not be enough...

[Mukesh Tiwari]

Hi @Kamil Szewczyk

You can try services like catch point or NewRelic

Using selenuim you should not be running the tests very frequent to avoid issues like out of stock products etc.

[Stuart M]

What you need is "transaction website monitoring". Plenty of companies out there do this which will allow you to setup scheduled web walks that do things such as add to basket, checkout and browse random product pages.

Here is a few I've used before:

https://www.uptrends.com/en/monitoring/transaction-monitoring

https://www.pingdom.com/product/transaction-monitoring