Shipping code quickly with confidence: Synthetic Testing
Blog post from Basis Theory
Synthetic testing, or synthetic monitoring, simulates real user behavior from outside a deployed application to verify production availability, critical functionality, infrastructure, and dependencies before users encounter failures. In the Basis Theory testing series, sendsecure.ly uses Datadog Synthetic Tests configured with Pulumi and TypeScript to run health checks, multi-step API workflows that create and retrieve secrets, and browser tests covering the main UI flow across multiple locations, browsers, and devices. The approach emphasizes monitoring happy paths and system health rather than finding bugs, since production-discovered issues are more costly and exhaustive failure scenarios are better handled through acceptance and integration testing. Teams should select tools based on needed API and browser coverage, historical results, alert integrations, geographic testing, metrics, and cost, while balancing scheduled checks against deployment-triggered tests. The post also recommends carefully tuning test frequency, regional coverage, retries, and alerts to avoid unnecessary load and alert fatigue, concluding that synthetic tests provide confidence in an application’s ongoing production availability but do not yet address throughput, vulnerabilities, or resistance to common security attacks.
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