Announcing general availability of Synthetic Monitoring in CI/CD for IBM Instana Observability

Modern delivery teams ship code continuously, but too many test the “real” user experience only after deployment. By then, performance regressions, wasted resources and downtime risks are already in play.

Our view is simple: Shifting left, embedding automation and intelligence from Day 0, is important. It helps teams stay ahead, reduce costs and ensure performance before issues happen.

With this capability, DevOps and SRE teams can reuse the exact same production synthetic tests in their pre-production pipelines, thereby enforcing performance, availability and functionality standards before code reaches production. Pipelines can run selected tests on demand and make promotion decisions automatically based on pass/fail signals.  

Observability that starts only in production creates blind spots between staging and live traffic. Shifting synthetic monitoring left closes that gap, and does it with the same thresholds and user journeys you rely on in production. 

These five advancements illustrate how Instana extends observability into the CI/CD pipeline, empowering teams to test earlier, deploy faster and release with confidence.

1. One test definition, all environments. Maintain a single source of truth for synthetic tests and thresholds; apply it consistently across dev, test, staging and prod to eliminate drift. 
2. On-demand, pipeline-triggered runs. Invoke Instana’s CI/CD OpenAPI or synctl to execute existing tests and gate deployments based on results—approve or roll back automatically. 
3. Local developer toolchain. Open-source, vendor-maintained local runners for browser and API synthetics let engineers author and debug tests locally for rapid pre-commit iteration and easy CI adoption. 
4. Two layers of synthetics in one platform. Combine high-cadence host-agent checks for quick detection with rich browser/API tests for user-journey evidence—all within Instana. 
5. Integrates with your CI/CD. Works with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI and Azure DevOps; open APIs support any pipeline that can make HTTP calls. 

Teams adopting Instana’s CI/CD Synthetic Monitoring can expect tangible improvements across reliability, efficiency and speed. By applying the same rigorous checks earlier in the lifecycle, you can reduce regressions and gain release confidence; pipelines fail fast with actionable, detailed feedback, not mystery flakes.

When a test fails, teams get detailed synthetic evidence correlated with observability context, allowing them to diagnose and fix issues before retrying. This lowers rework costs and minimizes firefighting after go-live.

Even though a gating step might add minutes to a build, the overall effect is faster throughput by preventing rollbacks and hotfixes later.

With on-demand test execution API, trigger Instana tests on demand and receive real-time results, helping DevOps build automated, test-gated deployments. This helps organizations shift left introducing synthetic monitoring into their CI/CD pipeline.

Instana Synthetic Monitoring simulates user actions across locations, devices and networks to track availability and response time. It’s deeply integrated with Instana’s observability platform—so synthetic signals arrive with the same rich context you use for APM, infrastructure and end-user monitoring. 

Try the feature in IBM Instana Sandbox

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