Obserfana

Beginner+ • 1 day

Testing in Production with Grafana Synthetics: See It Before They Do

A hands-on workshop on using Grafana Synthetic Monitoring to catch issues before your users do. From your first multistep check to alerts and automated deployment with Terraform.

Format: In-person or remote workshop

This page describes the standard workshop format. The content can be adapted to fit your organisation’s stack, tooling, and production environment. No two sessions are the same.

What this workshop covers

You might already have monitoring. But monitoring depends on user interactions. It only tells you something went wrong after someone ran into it. If you want to catch issues before your users do, you need to test in production.

This workshop shows you how to do that with Grafana Synthetic Monitoring. You’ll go from your first multistep check to a fully automated deployment pipeline with meaningful alerts, all within free-tier accounts. No credit card required.

By the end of the session, you’ll know what synthetic monitoring is, why it matters, and how to set it up in a way that actually scales.

Course outline

Session 1: Foundations and Setup (90 minutes)

  1. Introduction to production testing and synthetic monitoring
  2. Understanding the observability gap and the role of synthetic monitoring
  3. The business case for proactive monitoring
  4. Setting up your local environment
  5. Hands-on: Creating your first k6 test

Session 2: User Journey Simulation (90 minutes)

  1. Understanding user journey scripts
  2. Browser-based monitoring vs API checks
  3. Creating multi-step user simulations
  4. Advanced scripting techniques
  5. Hands-on: Building a complete user journey

Session 3: Performance Monitoring and Metrics (90 minutes)

  1. Core performance metrics and their significance
  2. Setting up performance benchmarks
  3. Geographic distribution of checks
  4. Hands-on: Performance measurement implementation

Session 4: Alerting and Production Integration (90 minutes)

  1. Alert design principles and best practices
  2. Setting up meaningful thresholds
  3. Integration with existing workflows
  4. Advanced alert routing and grouping
  5. Hands-on: Complete monitoring setup
  6. Q&A and troubleshooting

Labs

All labs run against the Quick Pizza app, a sample production-like environment built for this workshop.

  • Create your first k6 test and run it locally
  • Build a complete multi-step user journey simulation
  • Implement performance benchmarks and geographic checks
  • Configure alert routing and integrate with your existing workflows

Prerequisites

Everything in this workshop runs within free tiers. No credit card needed.

  • A GitHub account, Grafana Cloud account, and Terraform Cloud account
  • A laptop (Windows, Mac, or Linux) with Terraform CLI and Docker installed
  • A basic understanding of JavaScript, JSON, and CI/CD

Installation instructions are shared ahead of the session.

Who this is for

DevOps engineers and SREs who want to get ahead of production issues. QA engineers expanding their work beyond pre-release testing. Frontend and backend developers who want visibility into how their code behaves in production. Technical leads and architects thinking about observability strategy. If you build or maintain software that runs in production, this workshop is relevant to you. It’s designed for beginner+, so no deep Grafana experience needed.

This workshop is built around your situation

The format above is the standard starting point. If your team has a specific production environment, a particular tech stack, or existing synthetic tests that need improving, I adapt the content to fit. The goal is that you leave with something you can actually use on Monday.

Get in touch at info@obserfana.com to talk through what makes sense for your team.