September 2021

Speedway Site & API Monitoring

We’re pleased to announce Loadster’s sidekick application, Speedway, for Site & API monitoring!

You probably noticed the monitoring feature in Loadster this past year: run a Loadster script on a schedule and get alerted if anything goes wrong. It’s kind of like Pingdom or Uptime, but with more powerful scripting.

This monitoring approach is often called active monitoring or synthetic monitoring, and it’s an important part of the site reliability stack. Active monitoring is highly recommended if you want to be alerted of site downtime and breakage, especially if you want to test multiple pages or endpoints back to back.

The scripting is the same, but the motivations and methodology are a bit different between load testing and monitoring.

With load testing, you’ll typically…

  • Run many bots at once
  • Test when you deploy new versions or change the environment
  • Expect errors pretty often
  • Have the luxury of time in addressing problems

With active monitoring, you’ll typically…

  • Run a single bot at a time
  • Test around the clock, 24x7x365
  • Expect errors only when something breaks
  • Get alerted and fix problems urgently

Reusing your load test scripts for active monitoring (and vice versa) saves time on script creation and reduces the effort of maintaining your scripts, while making sure you can react quickly to problems and be proactive about it.

Enter Speedway

Long story short, there’s so much we want to do with monitoring that we’ve spun it off into a separate product, called Speedway. Speedway is purpose-built for monitoring.

Speedway Monitoring

Sharing between Loadster and Speedway

If you already set up monitoring in Loadster, don’t worry! They’re still running in Speedway and haven’t missed a beat.

Loadster and Speedway run on the same underlying platform, and even share a backend environment. That means you can continue to reuse your Loadster scripts for monitoring and anyone on your team can do the same.

Bouncing between Loadster and Speedway is quick. You’ll see an updated monitoring widget on your Loadster dashboard that automatically logs you in to Speedway, and from the Speedway side, you can create monitors with your existing Loadster scripts. Your Loadster account is also a Speedway account, so you can sign in to either product with the same username and password.

When a Loadster script is used for monitoring by Speedway, you’ll see a badge on the Loadster side with the latest monitoring status. Clicking the badge takes you to the monitor in Speedway.

Speedway Script Sharing

Creating a new monitor with an existing Loadster script is easy… just go to Speedway and create a new monitor, and choose your Loadster script instead of creating a new one.

Speedway monitoring plans are now separate

A challenge we were having with the monitoring feature in Loadster was that different customers had very different monitoring needs. You might do lots of load testing but not need monitoring. Or you might want to monitor your site constantly but only load test once in a while for major releases.

Designing a one-size-fits-all plan for monitoring and load testing was tricky.

Now that monitoring is part of Speedway, it’s decoupled from load testing, so you can choose your monitoring plan separately. Speedway’s free plan will get you started. If you need more than that, just pick the Speedway plan that fits.