Monitoring and Support are intricate aspects after a software deployment/upgrade. Utilize automation for our system monitoring – synthetic checks.

The Synthetic Checks (sampling Jenkins)

1. Is Jenkins up and running (e.g. can you log into Jenkins)?
2. Do objects/elements exist as expected?
3. Are projects/folders accessible?
4. Can you execute a job?

— What do we mean by Synthetic Checks?

Synthetic tests mimic real user traffic by sending simulated requests to our applications and services.

— Why should we periodically check/test our systems?

Synthetic Checks are automated tests scheduled to execute periodically to inspect the health of our systems and report failures before our Users experience them.

— How do we create Synthetic Checks?

Pre-requisite: It is assumed we have Jenkins (and Firefox) in this example or install Jenkins before continuing; as of this writing, we are using Jenkins 2.426.1.

1. Install our Development environment
   • Programing Language: for Example, Install Python on MacOS (it is assumed brew exists). On MacOS, you may already have a version of python which you can check with the command=”python –version”
     • Run command, brew install python (note: pip is also installed)
   • Development IDE: for example, Visual Studio
     • Download and install Visual Studio
2. Install libraries and packages that you will utilize for developing our automation tests
   • For example: we will develop tests to check Jenkins
     • Run command, pip install selenium
     • Run command, pip install unittest (you can also use pytest which we’ll demo as well)
3. Write our Tests. In our example, we are creating test_Jenkins.py
   • For example: create our procedures
   • For example: create our tests
4. Test our App
   • Run command, python -m test_Jenkins
   • For example, you should get the following results
5. We will execute a Jenkins Job and Dockerize the test

— How do we schedule Synthetic Checks?

We can utilize a monitoring tool like Sensu; you can create a custom check that runs our automation tests periodically (e.g. every 10min).