Playwright Check Suites Are Now GA - But What Does That Mean For You?

There are only a few companies that successfully invest in actively monitoring real user flows in production. I’ve been puzzled by the state of the art for many years, because I’m an anxious developer that always needs to know that production is “all right”. How can it be okay for all of us to wait for error logs, thrown exceptions or customer complains to learn about production issues? Shouldn’t knowing that all the systems are operational at all time be the ultimate monitoring goal? And why’s no one actively testing and monitoring core application flows in production to ensure that all customers are having a good time? The short answer: developers, QA engineers and SREs think that synthetic monitoring or “testing in production” is too hard. But is it really? We at Checkly have some news, so buckle up! Playwright has Taken over the End-to-end Testing Market The teams at Microsoft started working on the Playwright end-to-end testing framework in February 2020. If you fast forward to today, the project took over the testing community, convincing with multiple-browser support, advanced error traces, built-in multi-threading, and an overall stellar developer experience. Two million daily npm downloads can’t be wrong, can they? Thanks to Microsoft, end-to-end testing and validating user flows with real browsers is a solved problem. So, here’s a thought; if developers and QA engineers adopt Playwright to simulate and test their critical application features in CI/CD to avoid regressions, why do we all stop there? Why is Playwright only used for pre-production testing? If we now have a tool that helps us catch bugs before they go live, why don’t we take the test suites that are already implemented, replace clunky monitoring solutions, and bury the belief that “testing in production” is too hard? Well, that’s exactly what we’ve been busy building and I’m excited to share that Playwright Check Suites just went into general availability. Let me explain how they work and conv…