The Importance of Synthetic Monitoring for Business Continuity

As businesses strive to reduce waste, contain costs, and boost profits in today's hyper-competitive tech ecosystem, increasing deployment speeds has become critical.

The faster and smarter you launch, the quicker you reap the rewards. In fact, in 2018, over 46% of dev teams used agile project methodologies to streamline their development pipelines.

Let's address the churn factor.

While many organisations excel at launch speed, few have optimised their delivery value stream. What good is rapid deployment if your product contains errors? This is the prevailing challenge in development. The average app loses 95% of its users after just 90 days.

Why? Because the intrinsic focus on launch-to-market speed has caused teams to sideline a continuous testing framework, which would enable quick adaptation to evolving market demands.

Want to know the top reason for high customer attrition rates? It's poor app experiences. Roughly 67% of customers who stop doing business with a company cite poor experiences as their top reason for leaving. So, the question is, how do you increase testing capabilities AND boost speed to remain competitive? The answer is DevOps.

So where does DevOps fit in?

DevOps is a combination of tools and philosophies that help accomplish one major goal — bringing development and operations teams together under the same banner to tap the benefits of enhanced collaboration.

In a traditional ops model, dev and ops teams exist in unique, fractured ecosystems. In other words, they're suspended in communication silos that lead to operational inefficiencies. Both teams track different KPIs, work on different components, and have little to no real-time visibility into the delivery value stream.

DevOps tears down these walls by removing siloed dev processes. It also incorporates early, frequent testing into the SDLC and fosters responsible, collaborative relationships between dev and ops teams.

In all, DevOps decreases launch times, facilitates collaborative efforts, and removes silos that can clutter delivery pipelines. However, one trend in DevOps has become particularly relevant in today's environment — shift-left testing.

It's just a jump to the left.

In a sense, DevOps is the kryptonite of user errors. But it doesn't do that job alone: its sidekick is automated, shift-left testing. By testing earlier and more often, DevOps can "deliver software more quickly, reliably, and safely." You don't just want faster app launches; you want secure launches that are reliable and deliver a greater ROI. And the best approach is testing real user behaviour with synthetic monitoring.

Synthetic monitoring + DevOps. The best of both worlds.

Automated testing tools like synthetic monitoring are the reason 63% of DevOps teams report improved quality in their app deployments. Let's consider how testing works in traditional ops. If traditional ops teams implement quality assurance testing at all, the testing phase is often pushed off until the end of the development process.

Once the app is finished, manual testers begin identifying code anomalies. This results in overlooked issues in the delivery value stream, scope creep, slower time-to-market launches, and friction-filled environments between dev and tester teams.

DevOps flips this framework on its head. Instead of testing ad hoc and post-dev, DevOps teams implement shift-left (continuous) testing using automated synthetic monitoring software. A key component of synthetic monitoring is that it can automatically predict and proactively correct bugs, UX challenges, and performance issues 24/7 and at every stage of the SDLC.

So, after every new change has been implemented, you can test it immediately. This means building smarter, more consistent, more reliable, and ultimately more secure apps from the start. Synthetic monitoring is the leading methodology of DevOps for three reasons:

• It satisfies the need for shift-left, automated early testing.
• It requires minimal setup and can be instantly integrated into any Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.
• It's fast and capable of simulating actual user actions — making it scalable, flexible, and affordable.

The future is automated.

Imagine an automated testing solution that can detect issues 24/7, enable waterfall analysis of each issue, provide granular insight into issues within user-defined testing parameters, run scripts simulating real-user actions, share video replays of errors, and be implemented at any stage in the DevOps cycle. That's what good synthetic monitoring can deliver.

This means no more paying for crowd-sourced QA testing, a leaner manual testing team, and better visibility into your app environments. Shift-left testing can define your DevOps transformation. With faster, smarter, automated testing, you can avoid typical testing pitfalls while improving your overall user experience. Speed and reliability don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Test earlier, faster, and smarter.

Believe it or not, not all synthetic monitoring solutions improve the DevOps experience. Some require hard-coded tests that drain engineering resources. Others are limited to a single application or platform type.

Luckily, 2Steps has none of these drawbacks. The platform was built to facilitate shift-left testing from the start. Simply use the visual test builder to create no-code tests in minutes. Then set your monitoring interval for continuous testing 24/7. It's that simple. You even have the ability to monitor third-party architecture (over 90% of projects use third-party open-source components and libraries).

Studies conducted by Google show that "automated testing positively impacts continuous integration (CI)." And the tech giant recommends that DevOps teams invest in automated testing suites to improve CI.

So if you're ready to join the testing revolution, accelerate time-to-market, and build more effective apps, talk to 2Steps today.