Synthetic Monitoring with Kane CLI

Defining Synthetic Monitoring

By simulating critical business interactions like authentication, multi-tenant searches, cart additions, and payment processing, synthetic monitoring flags environment drift, certificate expirations, and third-party API degradation. It catches these problems before a real user ever encounters them.

Pre-Merge CI Gating vs Scheduled Production Monitoring

Both run browser checks, but they serve different parts of the lifecycle. The distinction is about when each check runs and what kind of failure it is positioned to catch.

• CI gating: runs on pull requests to catch logical regressions before merge.
• Synthetic monitoring: runs continuously on a cron schedule against the live environment to catch infrastructure drift, CDN routing failures, database locks, and third-party API issues a pre-merge check can never see.

With Kane CLI you do not maintain two frameworks. The same plain-English objective that gates a PR drops into a GitHub Actions schedule, so the check that runs in CI/CD also runs your production monitor. For the one-off check right after each release, see smoke testing command line.

Note: Put your critical flows on a schedule and alert on the first failure. Start free. Try Kane CLI

Bundling Critical Business Flows Into a Central Script

Bundle your highest-value paths into an orchestration script so a failure on any journey triggers a non-zero exit for the whole run. Save it at monitoring/synthetic-monitor.sh.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -uo pipefail

FAILED=0

run_flow () {
  local name="$1"
  local objective="$2"
  echo "::group::${name}"
  kane-cli run "$objective" \
    --headless --agent --timeout 300 \
    --username "$LT_USERNAME" --access-key "$LT_ACCESS_KEY"
  local code=$?
  if [ "$code" -ne 0 ]; then
    echo "FAILED: ${name} (exit ${code})"
    FAILED=1
  fi
  echo "::endgroup::"
}

run_flow "login"    "go to https://myapp.com, log in as '{{user}}', assert the dashboard shows 'Welcome'"
run_flow "search"   "go to https://myapp.com, search for 'headphones', assert results appear"
run_flow "checkout" "go to https://myapp.com, complete checkout with a test card, assert the order confirmation page shows"

exit "$FAILED"

When asserting against live production, use dedicated isolated test accounts and read-only queries where possible. This avoids polluting analytics or triggering real charges.

Setting Up the Scheduled GitHub Actions Workflow

Write a scheduled workflow at .github/workflows/synthetic-monitoring.yml that runs every 15 minutes, provisions Chrome, and loads credentials from repository secrets. The schedule cron and the if: failure() alert step do the heavy lifting.

name: Synthetic Monitoring
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '*/15 * * * *'
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  monitor:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: '20'
      - name: Install Chrome
        uses: browser-actions/setup-chrome@v1
      - name: Install Kane CLI
        run: npm install -g @testmuai/kane-cli
      - name: Run synthetic checks
        env:
          LT_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.LT_USERNAME }}
          LT_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.LT_ACCESS_KEY }}
        run: |
          chmod +x ./monitoring/synthetic-monitor.sh
          ./monitoring/synthetic-monitor.sh
      - name: Alert Slack on failure
        if: failure()
        env:
          SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL: ${{ secrets.SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL }}
        run: |
          curl -s -X POST -H 'Content-type: application/json' \
            --data '{"text":"Synthetic monitoring failed. Open the GitHub Actions run for the Kane CLI ShareLink."}' \
            "$SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL"

Proactive Failure Alerting and Triage

When a flow breaks, the script surfaces a non-zero exit, failing the step. The if: failure() step then fires an actionable Slack notification to the on-call channel.

Because Kane CLI captures video records and step-by-step logs for every run, the Actions log shows a secure ShareLink. On-call engineers click it to watch the failure replay, reducing MTTR.

Note: Want the agent mode and credentials setup behind this monitor? Read the Kane CLI docs. Read the docs

The same objective that runs every 15 minutes in production also runs before merge, the way Kane CLI handles a UI check before a PR ever lands.