Where DevOps meets QA: An observability and synthetic testing success story

Goal: to monitor transactions and proactively test uptime. At GWI, the DevOps team was passionate about their Grafana dashboards, while the QA team was occupied with their k6 performance testing suite. But functional testing is not something that can inform users of the uptime of their applications in a timely manner, so there was a gap in GWI’s efforts related to observability and testing. In this talk, Dionysis Tsoumas and Ioannis Papadakis will discuss how the two teams decided to collaborate on a pet project that would enable them to achieve synthetic monitoring. By leveraging k6 and the Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, and Mimir) and alerting engineering teams on uptime issues on the applications through an advanced Prometheus alerting mechanism, the QA and DevOps teams for the first time were able to review challenges and techniques between two similar but separate domains. Result: end-to-end user flows executing constantly and monitoring web performance to proactively alert engineering teams for potential incidents.

Speakers

Ioannis Papadakis
Ioannis Papadakis
Director of QA  •  GWI
Ioannis is a passionate software engineer with over 13 years of experience across various domains, including telecom, market research, and e-publishing. His keen interest in automating software development processes led him to specialize in testing and test-driven development approaches. Throughout his career, Ioannis has worked on demanding projects primarily focused on test automation. As a k6 Champion, he strives to contribute to the success of performance testing initiatives with k6.
    Dionysis Tsoumas
    Dionysis Tsoumas
    Director of DevOps  •  GWI
    Dionysis is a passionate DevOps leader with a keen interest in Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and cost optimization. He loves collaborating with teams to foster a DevOps mindset and consistently advocates for continuous learning. Dionysis has been a Grafana Champion since the inception of the program and regularly speaks at engineering conferences and meetups. In his current role, he is leading the DevOps team at GWI.