Running Synthetics workshop at Test Automation Days
A recap of running Testing in Production with Grafana Synthetics at Test Automation Days in Hilversum, with a room full of QA engineers and some genuinely good discussions.
Test Automation Days in Hilversum on March 3. A packed room, a four-hour slot, and an audience made up almost entirely of QA engineers. A crowd of QA always makes for a good day of discussions!
Fitting a full day into four hours
The full version of this workshop runs a full day. For Test Automation Days I had a half-day slot, so I had to make choices. I trimmed the labs and tightened the pacing, but kept the core intact: what synthetic monitoring is, where it fits in your observability stack, and how to actually set it up.
It was tight. The combination of hands-on work and good discussions meant we were pushing right up to the end. Anyone who didn’t finish the labs had everything they needed to complete them at home. The workshop materials are open and the GitHub project has an issue tracker, so they can always pick up where we left off or drop a question if they get stuck.
The conversations that made it interesting
A room full of testers brings a different set of questions than a mixed engineering crowd. The testing pyramid came up, as it always does. I mentioned that I prefer the Test Desiderata 2.0 over the classic pyramid. Not because the pyramid is wrong, but because the Desiderata focuses on what a test should deliver rather than where it should sit in a theoretical hierarchy. For a room of QA professionals, that landed well.
More discussions were around test data management in production and handling sensitive flows like payments. These are real problems when you’re simulating user journeys against a live environment. You can’t just fire off test payments and hope for the best. We talked through approaches: dedicated test accounts, synthetic payment flows, environment isolation. No single right answer, but good to think through out loud with a group that actually deals with this day to day.
A bonus
Test Automation Days is a conference I’ve been to before. This edition I got to see some old colleagues I hadn’t crossed paths with in a while. That’s one of the things I like about this community. It stays connected.
Running this at your organisation
The half-day format works well for teams that want to get started without committing to a full day. If you want to go deeper, the full-day version covers more ground and gives more time for the labs and the kind of discussions we had at TAD.
Either way, the content is always shaped around your team’s stack and the production environment you’re actually working with.
Get in touch at info@obserfana.com if you want to talk through what makes sense for your team.