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Overview

Collections help with monitoring end-to-end workflows or help with executing same tests/monitors on several environments.

Workflow Monitoring​

A Collection is an ordered list of monitors/tests that are executed sequentially to verify an end-to-end workflow or scenario. An collection can be composed of both Browser Tests or API monitors to complete the verification of your use case.

Steps in a collection can also be executed with an optional delay of upto 1 hour to simulate a real-world scenario or provide time for execution of your workflow on your system before assertions.

Monitoring end-to-end scenarios in a complex system helps ensure your most critical happy path scenarios are working as expected and any regressions are caught before your customers encounter them.

Example - Time-off request workflow​

Imagine you have a Workflow System for employees requesting time-off and you would like to monitor an end-to-end functionality.

  1. An Employee logs into your application and submits a request for time-off.
  2. A workflow is then triggered and the time-off request is assigned to a manager for approval. Assume this workflow takes about 2 minutes to complete.
  3. Manager logs in to the system and checks the request. Then approves this request.
  4. The employee logs back into the application and the record is then shown as approved.

This scenario can be broken down into three tests, as below:

  1. Submit a time-off request
  2. Approve a time-off request
  3. Verify time-off request approval

It's possible to execute these tests separately to ensure each of these functionalities are working as expected. However, Collections help compose all these tests into an execution sequence to verify the end-to-end scenario. Here is a screenshot of the Collection for this flow:

Time-off request workflow - example

The above screenshot show the sequence of steps to be executed for verifying your application's end-to-end functionality. Noce that Approve a time-off request also has a 5 minute delay to help ensure the two-minute workflow execution time in this flow is accounted for during the verification.

Collections also support execution of the end-to-end flow manually or can also be scheduled to run at regular intervals.

Monitoring multiple environments​

One other use case for using Collections is to execute a set of tests on multiple environments. Imagine you have 10 production servers and you have 10 tests to be executed in each of these servers. Instead of creating 10 tests for each environment (10 * 10 tests for all the environments), you can just create 10 tests which can be added to different Collections for execution on 10 different servers.

Collections allow overriding default environment variables associated to a monitor. For example, you can create a Collection for running against your Staging environment and another Collection for running against your Production, both of them leveraging the same underlying tests/monitors.

Learn more about multi-environment monitoring

Failure notifications​

Collections themselves do not have any pass/fail states. They just allow you to execute your monitors or tests in a sequence.

Notifications are sent as per the preferences/integrations associated to the underlying Browser Tests or API monitors.