Running my Synthetics workshop at WebDevCon
A recap of running Testing in Production with Grafana Synthetics at WebDevCon in Amsterdam, and what 16 engineers walked away with.
Running a tech workshop in a movie theater is a first for me. On March 10, that’s exactly what happened at WebDevCon in Pathé Amsterdam Noord.
Sixteen engineers showed up for a full day of production testing with Grafana Synthetics. A mix of developers and DevOps engineers, which is exactly the kind of crowd this workshop is built for. Production testing isn’t just a QA concern, and it was good to see that reflected in the room.
How the day went
We started with a short intro on observability and where synthetic monitoring fits in. A lot of teams have monitoring set up, but monitoring is reactive by nature. It tells you something broke after a user ran into it. Synthetics turns that around: you simulate user behavior before anything goes wrong, continuously, from multiple locations. With that in the pocket, the rest of the day makes a lot more sense.
From there we moved into the hands-on part. Everyone worked through the labs against the Quick Pizza app, scripting their first k6 test, building multi-step user journeys, setting up performance benchmarks, and wiring up alerts that actually mean something. By the time we wrapped up around 16:00, everyone had a working setup.
No one got lost. No one dropped out. That’s not nothing for a full-day technical workshop.
What made it work
The mix of the crowd helped. Developers and DevOps engineers approaching the same problem from different angles tend to push each other in good ways. When someone from a DevOps background connects the alerting setup to their on-call workflow, and a developer next to them suddenly sees why that matters, that’s the conversation I want happening in the room.
What participants walked away with
By the end of the day, everyone had:
- A working k6 synthetic test running locally and deployed to Grafana Cloud
- Multi-step user journey simulations covering real production scenarios
- Performance benchmarks and geographic monitoring configured
- Alert routing set up and integrated into their existing workflows
More importantly, they left with learnings for where synthetic monitoring fits in an observability stack and why waiting for users to report problems is not a real strategy.
Running this at your organisation
WebDevCon was a conference setting with a diverse crowd. The workshop also runs well as an in-house day for engineering teams who want to set this up for their own production environment. The content stays the same, but the labs use your stack and your services instead of a demo app.
If that’s something you’re looking at, get in touch at info@obserfana.com.