How Samsara does stress test automation of their app with Browserless
Samsara is pioneering the Connected Operations Cloud, which allows organizations that depend on physical operations to harness IoT (Internet of Things) data to develop actionable business insights and improve their operations. This interesting 1 min video helps explain:
Samsara’s platform integrates and surfaces a huge amount of data, an average of more than 5 billion data points per day across our customers’ more than 1 million connected devices. To make that information useful to their customers, data is consolidated into a single view with dashboards that allow them to manage their operations remotely. For example, setting remote alerts to notify users when a specific event or behavior occurs.
Samsara has thousands of clients and it’s important to provide accurate, high-quality service. One way they accomplish this is by using automation to consistently stress test their dashboard and cloud service. That’s where Browserless helps them; making those tests much faster, easier, and more accurate.
Christopher Zhen, Software Engineer at Samsara joined us to share a few quick thoughts on how Samsara has implemented Browserless for stress test automation. We hope it sparks some ideas for how Browserless might help your service in a similar way. Let’s jump into the discussion.
- What problems does Browserless solve for Samsara?
We use Browserless at Samsara to generate fake traffic for our cloud dashboard. In particular, we have internal SLAs for route load successes/durations and for routes that don’t have a lot of customer traffic, it’s hard to prevent a single error from triggering an SLO alert.
With Browserless, we can generate fake traffic to a route and prevent these false-positive alerts.
- What were you doing before Browserless?
Previously, Samsara silenced monitors that were too noisy and had too many false positives due to lack of traffic.
Why did Samsara choose Browserless for stress test automation?
Samsara was hosting its own Puppeteer-driven smoke testing service, which required specialized operational attention to maintain and scale. They began looking for third-party hosted solutions so that they could focus their attention on building and supporting the core products, and Browserless seemed to fit the bill.
Thanks for taking the time, Christopher! We appreciate the partnership with Samsara!
Want to use Browserless for your own QA testing process?
Be more confident with your deployments with stress test automation. Use Browserless to make sure your website or application is performant and reliable on tens, hundreds, or thousands of browsers at once.
Our stats API reveals key metrics about a site from a reliability and performance standpoint. It includes useful metrics like latency, time-to-interaction, search engine optimization and other useful recommendations.
Use the stats API to test your website or application on modern Chrome. Test new releases and get the peace of mind that you will find issues before your user base does.
How to get started with Browserless?
There are different ways to use our product.
- Use our online debugger to try it out!
- Sign up for a free account and get an API key. You have 6 hours of usage for free! After that, you can pay as you go, and only pay per second that you use!
- You can self-host for development purposes by using our OpenSource browserless docker image
- If you’ve already tested our service and want a dedicated machine for your requests, you might be interested in signing up for a dedicated account, this works best if you're doing screencasting or have a heavy load of requests since you won’t be sharing resources.
If you’re using one of our hosted services: be that a usage-based or capacity-based, just connect to our WebSocket Secure with your token to start your web automation!