Speedway is an active monitoring tool for web applications and APIs. Once you have monitoring in place, you’ll be able to proactively find and fix problems, often before your users even notice them.
Think of it like continuous automated regression testing… in production.
Speedway’s Protocol Bots and Browser Bots test your site around the clock and alert you if there are any problems.
Active Monitoring (or Synthetic Monitoring) means hitting your site with realistic traffic on a regular schedule to make sure it is working as expected. With every monitor cycle, Speedway executes individual requests or full user journeys against your site, and lets you know if anything is broken. Speedway also tracks response time so you can see how your site’s performance changes over time. It’s called “active” or “synthetic” monitoring because Speedway is actively generating the traffic, not just observing traffic from your end users.
Passive Monitoring, on the other hand, means passively observing the site as it handles requests, and watching for errors or slow response times. You might already be using a passive monitoring tool such as New Relic or Datadog for this. We do too! They’re a great way to keep tabs on how your production systems are performing and behaving.
Active and passive monitoring aren’t mutually exclusive. To get a full picture of your site’s performance and behavior, you should use both. Think of them as proactive and reactive approaches.
Protocol Bots generate HTTP(S) requests for testing pretty much anything that runs HTTP. As long as you can send an HTTP request at it and get back a response, you can monitor it with Speedway. That includes static sites as well as the large majority of REST, GraphQL, JSON-RPC, XML-RPC, and SOAP APIs. They run protocol scripts.
Browser Bots control real headless Chrome browsers, and test at a higher level than Protocol Bots. For rich complex web applications, monitoring with real browsers is the most realistic way. It also tends to be the easiest. They run browser scripts.
Speedway notifies you (and/or anyone on your team) when one of your monitors fails or recovers. You can get these notifications via text message (SMS) or email, with many other integrations courtesy of our Integration Partners.
If one of your monitors fails, Speedway sends you the information you need to troubleshoot the issue. Click a link in the notification to view the screenshots, logs, and full requests and responses from each monitor cycle. In most cases you can quickly pin down what changed on your site or environment that led to the breakage.