What is Functional Monitoring?

Hari Mahesh

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”– Albert Einstein.

Just imagine you are in a deep sleep, and suddenly, your phone gives continuous beeps. While checking, you understand it’s because your application in production encountered some unexpected errors and caused failures. You need to log in and fix this issue as soon as possible. But you had monitoring, everything was set up great, and your metrics showed green. However, now your customers can’t purchase the product in production, or the registration doesn’t work.

This is a common scenario for any developer or stakeholder who has released a new version to the production environment. So, the question is how we can eliminate this scenario. The answer to this is Functional Monitoring: where you’d want to set up something that would monitor how your product works in production from an end-user’s perspective.

In this article, we will discuss functional monitoring and how it can help reduce the impact on your business.

The Gap in Traditional Monitoring

Let is take an example, imagine a scenario where you have a sophisticated monitoring setup and your infrastructure metrics, such as CPU usage, memory consumption, network latency, and server uptime, are all green. This means all the system hardware and services are functioning well. But still, you get complaints from the customers that they cannot place an order or complete registration. This situation shows a critical gap in traditional monitoring approaches. 

Traditional monitoring focuses primarily on the health and performance of the underlying infrastructure. However, it might often miss the actual functional aspects of the application that directly impact users. 

Traditional monitoring answers the question, “Is the system up and running?” but does not address, “Is the system doing what users need it to do?”

Why Traditional Monitoring Falls Short?

Traditional monitoring tools are excellent at providing visibility into the technical aspects of an application’s environment. They can alert you to problems such as high CPU usage, memory leaks, network bottlenecks, or server downtimes. These are crucial for maintaining the health of your system, but they do not tell you whether the application is functioning correctly from an end-user perspective.

For example:

• Server Health: Your servers might be running smoothly without any signs of stress. However, this does not guarantee that your web application’s checkout process is functioning correctly.
• Database Performance: Your database may be performing optimally with fast query responses. But your users might still face errors when trying to register because of a bug in the application code.
• Network Latency: Low network latency indicates good network performance, it does not ensure that API endpoints are returning the correct responses for user transactions.

What is Functional Monitoring?

Functional monitoring is a practice that focuses on ensuring the key functionalities of the application work fine without any failures. This is based on the end-user’s perspective. Don’t get it confused with traditional network monitoring, where metrics like CPU usage or memory are used to track. In functional monitoring, critical scenarios like user log-in, product purchase, user registration, and payment options are monitored and checked that they are working as expected. This approach helps detect issues that directly affect the user experience and business operations. It provides a proactive resolution before these issues impact many users. 

We can see that functional monitoring focuses on the actual functionality of the application from the user’s perspective. It involves continuously testing and verifying that key functionalities work as expected in the production environment. It checks that important user journeys, such as making a purchase, registering an account, or logging in, are always working and up.

Key Components of Functional Monitoring

• Simulating User Interactions: Automated tests simulate real user interactions/actions with the application. For example, a test mimics a user adding items to a cart, proceeding to checkout, and completing a purchase. Your tests are actually testing important functionality that, if not working will have a notable impact on your business.
• Continuous Verification: These tests run continuously or at regular intervals, providing ongoing verification that key functionalities are working. That is to have a continuously running smoke test suite that would only notify you if there is an issue. This way if your customers can’t buy a product or register, you’d be immediately notified about it.
• Alerts and Reporting: When a test detects a failure, alerts are sent to the appropriate channels (e.g., Slack, Email, SMS) to ensure that the issue is addressed promptly.
• Real User Monitoring (RUM): Captures data from actual user interactions and provides a comprehensive view of the user experience.

Benefits of Functional Monitoring

Functional monitoring provides multiple benefits that help to maintain the health and performance of modern applications. Let’s check out a few benefits of functional monitoring.

• Improved User Experience: Functional monitoring checks that applications function correctly from the user’s perspective. Continuously verifying that critical functionalities like registration, login, and checkout processes are operational. It checks that users can perform their desired actions without issues. This leads to higher user satisfaction and better overall user experience.
• Proactive Issue Detection: Functional monitoring helps identify issues before they impact a large number of users. By simulating user interactions and continuously testing critical functionalities, potential problems can be detected early. This proactive approach allows you to address issues promptly, reducing downtime and minimizing user frustration.
• Reduced Business Impact: By focusing on the functionalities that have a direct impact on business operations, functional monitoring helps ensure business continuity. For example, if the checkout process on an e-commerce site is always functional, this will directly impact the sales. This reduces revenue loss and helps maintain a positive business reputation. Read: Why Companies Switch to testRigor for E-Commerce Testing?
• Enhanced Reliability: Continuous functional monitoring helps you maintain the reliability of the application. By regularly testing and validating key functionalities, organizations can make sure that their applications are robust and can handle user interactions without failures. This leads to a more dependable application that users can trust.
• Informed Decision-Making: Functional monitoring also provides valuable data and insights into the performance and reliability of key functionalities. The organization’s leadership can use this data to make informed decisions about future improvements, optimizations, and feature developments. It helps identify areas where the application may need enhancement and guides the prioritization of development efforts.
• Automated Testing and Alerts: Functional monitoring is based on automated tests that run continuously or at scheduled intervals. This automation reduces the need for manual testing, saving time and resources. Additionally, automated alerts notify the relevant teams immediately when issues are detected for faster response times.
  Read: Transitioning from Manual to Automated Testing.
• Quick Issue Resolution: With functional monitoring, you can detect and report issues promptly. This enables development and operations teams to respond quickly, reducing the time it takes to resolve problems. Faster issue resolution minimizes downtime and ensures that users can continue to interact with the application without prolonged interruptions.

How to Implement Functional Monitoring?

To implement functional monitoring, you need a structured approach. It requires an effective capture of the health and performance of an application from the user’s perspective. Here’s a step-by-step guide to implementing functional monitoring:

Identify Critical Functionalities

The first step is to identify the key functionalities of your application that need to be monitored. These are the critical user interactions that directly impact the user experience and business operations. Examples include:

• User registration
• Login and authentication
• Product search and listing
• Checkout and payment processing
• Account management

Develop Automated Tests

Once you identify the critical functionalities, the next step is to develop automated tests that simulate these user interactions. These tests should mimic real user actions and validate that the application behaves as expected. Here is a Test Automation Playbook.

Here are some commonly used tools for developing automated functional tests:

• tesRigor: Automate web browser interactions, mobile, desktop, API, and database testing.
• Postman: Perform API testing and monitoring.
• JMeter: Performance and functional testing of web applications.

Integrate with CI/CD Pipeline

Integrate functional monitoring tests into your CI/CD pipeline and make sure that these tests run automatically with each deployment. This integration helps catch issues early in the development process before they reach the production environment. Here are Continuous Integration and Testing: Best Practices. 

Tools commonly used for CI/CD integration are: 

• Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Travis CI, and CircleCI are popular tools for integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines. Read: Top 7 CI/CD Tools to Explore in 2024:.

Set Up Continuous Testing

Make sure that your tests run continuously or at scheduled intervals to provide ongoing verification of key functionalities. This can be achieved using CI/CD pipelines or dedicated scheduling tools like:

• Cron jobs: For scheduling scripts to run at regular intervals.
• Scheduled tasks: Using cloud services like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Functions.

Read more about What is Continuous Testing?

Configure Alerting Mechanisms

Effective alerting mechanisms are crucial for promptly addressing any issues detected by functional monitoring. You can configure alerts to notify the relevant teams through multiple channels to maintain visibility.

• Slack: Team communication and immediate alerts.
• Email: Detailed notifications and documentation.
• SMS/Phone: Critical alerts that require immediate attention.
• PagerDuty: Incident management and on-call notifications.

Monitor and Maintain Tests

Regularly review and update your tests to check they reflect the current state of the application. As new features are added and existing ones are modified, the monitoring tests should be updated accordingly to prevent outdated tests from providing misleading results.

Role of testRigor in Functional Monitoring

Using testRigor, you can easily set up functional monitoring. A few factors make testRigor the right choice for functional monitoring.

• Automation through Natural Language: testRigor is an intelligent generative AI-powered tool that lets you write test scripts in parsed plain English. You do not need any coding expertise. This feature helps a broader range of team members, including manual QA testers, management, business analysts, and stakeholders, to contribute to automated test creation. This drastically improves the test case coverage and covers more testing scenarios.
• Ultra-stable Element Locators: Unlike traditional tools that rely on XPath/CSS element identifiers, testRigor uses a unique approach for element locators. You simply describe elements by the text you see on the screen. testRigor, through the power of AI, finds them automatically. This helps the team focus more on creating new use cases than fixing the flaky XPaths and test maintenance.

click "cart"
click on button "Delete" below "Section Name"

• One Tool Covers all Testing Needs: testRigor performs more than just web or end-to-end test automation. You can test web and mobile browsers, mobile apps, desktop apps, APIs, visual testing, accessibility testing, and many more complex scenarios. testRigor takes care of all your testing needs singlehandedly.
• Seamless Integrations: testRigor offers built-in integrations with most of the popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins and CircleCI, test management systems like TestRail, defect tracking solutions like Jira and Pivotal Tracker, infrastructure providers like AWS and Azure, and communication tools like Slack, PagerDuty and Microsoft Teams.

login as customer
enter stored value "product" into "search"
type enter
click stored value "product"
click "256GB"
click "Titanium Yellow"
click "Add to cart"
click "No Thanks" if page contains "Phone Accident Protection Plan"
check that page contains "Added to cart"

As you can see, it doesn’t contain complex code or confusing XPaths. Additionally, with testRigor, we can create reusable functions and save them for future use. This eliminates the need to write all steps repeatedly; instead, we can simply invoke the function, such as login as customer. Furthermore, we can store values with identifiers and easily reference them in the script, as seen in the command, enter stored value ‘product’ into ‘search’.

You can go through the powerful features of testRigor, documentation, and benefits to have more clarity.

Conclusion

Functional monitoring is helpful in knowing that your application in production works correctly from the user’s perspective. By continuously testing critical functionalities, you can proactively detect and resolve issues before they are released to the market. It reduces the impact on a large number of users. Using advanced tools like testRigor, and setting up effective alerting mechanisms help maintain a reliable and seamless user experience. 

Regularly updating and analyzing your tests ensures they stay relevant as your application evolves. Functional monitoring can enhance user satisfaction, reduce downtime, and maintain the health of your application.