Quoting a conversation with one of our early adopters
Quoting a conversation with one of our early adopters:
Early Adopter: "What is PerfAgents?"
Our Team: PerfAgents is a unique monitoring layer designed for startups and enterprises. It checks whether an application or API is up or down!
Early Adopter: Well, that sounds like a solved problem!
Our Team: Well, it preemptively identifies issues before they impact end users, much like the existing tools. However, the difference is that, with PerfAgents, you can monitor your software just as you use it. And that's how we stand out from the existing tools.
Early Adopter: Please tell me about the differentiation.
Our Team: For sure. While other tools focus on monitoring production as a stand-alone activity, PerfAgents focuses on reusing the same test cases you have written for testing to be used for continuous monitoring.
Early Adopter: Sounds interesting!
Our Team: Great. To ensure your software works well end-to-end for your end users from their location and browsers, you need to monitor your production system continuously from locations you anticipate your users will access from and from browsers you think your users will use.
Early Adopter: Agreed!
Our Team: The whole user flow you anticipate your user will perform can be scripted, pre-scripted, using a test credential or a test user.
Early Adopter: Nice. Is that what synthetic monitoring is?
Our Team: Yes, and the best way you do it is by employing end-to-end web automation practices.
Early Adopter: What language or platform can I use to do that?
Our Team: Traditional monitoring systems developed custom recorders to record end-to-end tests for monitoring purposes. However, the downside is that they can only sometimes be run against lower environments, and even if they could, they would accumulate cost and add effort. That's why an excellent open-source web automation framework is most beneficial for these scenarios. The TLDR is: Use a good web automation framework to do your job.
Early Adopter: What would be a good example?
Our Team: Playwright, an open-source tool developed by Microsoft, is the best web automation tool currently available. Other frameworks, such as Selenium, Cypress, and Pptr, can also be used for the same use cases.
Early Adopter: Great. What languages do they support?
Our Team: They support a wide variety of languages, including Javascript and Python. Pptr, however, is for NodeJS alone, and it's not growing as much as the rest of the tools.
Early Adopter: Great. So, if I understand correctly, PerfAgents will let me run my Playwright script as a synthetic monitoring script to capture my application's performance data and alert me if latency is detected or if there is an issue loading any web page or API. Am I correct in my understanding?
Our Team: Precisely.
Early Adopter: Great, let's talk about the next steps!
Our Team: Sure!
TLDR - Then, they come on board and live a happy life as a customer ever after.