A Speedway monitor is basically a test script that is run by Protocol Bots or Browser Bots, to test your site on a regular schedule. It can be a single action, or multiple steps chained together. Think of it like a scheduled regression test that runs against your production or test environment, hitting your site with real traffic.
If any operation fails, or doesn’t satisfy your custom validation criteria, Speedway will mark that monitor as FAILING and notify you and your team immediately.
When you’re ready to create your first monitor, just head over to your Speedway dashboard.
A monitor runs a series of steps executed by either a Protocol Bot or a Browser Bot. The simplest monitors can be a single step (like visiting a home page or hitting a single API endpoint), but more sophisticated monitors chain together multiple steps to simulate an entire user journey.
A cycle is marked PASSING if all steps complete successfully, and FAILING otherwise.
After you configure your monitor with one or more steps, you can designate a scheduled interval for Speedway to run it. The interval can range anywhere from every minute to every 24 hours (some of the more frequent intervals require a paid plan).
With each cycle, Speedway plays through all the steps, and determines if it passed or failed.
It’s generally a good idea to run your monitors frequently, so you can find out about problems as soon as possible, but for quieter sites or less important features, infrequent monitoring might be fine.
You can specify one or more monitoring locations for each monitor. Your bots will run in these regions. With basic plans, you may be limited to a single location per monitor. With paid plans, you can select multiple locations per monitor.
When you select multiple locations, your monitor will run from all selected locations with each cycle. That means if you tell Speedway to run your monitor every 5 minutes, but select 3 locations, it will actually run 3 times every 5 minutes: once from each monitoring location.
At a minimum, we recommend selecting a location that is geographically close to where your users are based. You may notice different response times from different locations, due to network latency, and occasionally you might even discover issues with your site’s availability from different global regions.
You can toggle a monitor between active and inactive states. When it is active, the monitor will run according to schedule. When it is inactive, Speedway will not run it, but you can still run the script manually with the Play button.
Sometimes, when you know something on your site has changed and you haven’t had a chance to update its monitor yet, you may need to turn off that monitor for a while to spare your team the unnecessary alerts.
Otherwise, you’ll want to leave your monitors in the active state so Speedway can do its thing.