Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Synthetic Monitoring Is Broken. Your Production Traffic Can Fix It.

Synthetic monitoring has been a critical part of application reliability for years. It gives engineering and operations teams a way to proactively test applications, APIs, and critical customer journeys before users encounter problems. But there is a fundamental limitation with the traditional approach: Someone has to create the tests. As applications become more distributed and customer journeys become more complex, organizations can end up maintaining hundreds or even thousands of synthetic scripts.

Agent Plugins 1.0: One Packaging Format, and What It Changes for Testing Skills

Katalon's library of testing skills for AI agents holds 13 skills. Building it produces 124 files. The 13 skills are the actual work: how to plan a test cycle, how to design cases from a requirement, how to read a failing run and decide whether a release is safe. The other 111 files are packaging. Four of them arrived this month and they are the subject of this post.

What's New and Improved in Astera 11.2

A faster, efficient, more capable Astera with same licensing cost Astera 11.2 is available now for every product on the platform: Centerprise, ReportMiner, EDI Connect. High-volume jobs process up to 2x faster, extraction templates are generated under five seconds with AI-powered Auto-Generate Layout, and Dataflows can run a full retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline without a separate tool. The release also simplifies deployment, and adds email-driven workflow triggers.

Claude + MCPs Isn't a Semantic Layer: What Breaks When You Analyze Your Business Without One

Ask Claude for your average sales cycle today. Ask again next Tuesday. Same prompt, same MCPs, same playbook. There is a real chance the two numbers do not match. The reason is not exciting, and it costs you decisions. If you have wired Claude to your CRM, product, and finance tools through MCPs and given it a detailed playbook, you are already ahead of most companies asking whether AI can analyze the business. The gap between that and running the company off the answers is real, though.

Yellowfin BI 9.18 Brings Conversational Analytics You Can Trust

We are happy to announce the general availability of version 9.18 of Yellowfin BI, our business intelligence and embedded analytics platform. This release marks a step forward in how organizations and ISVs can combine the power of modern AI models with an auditable data analysis process.

Guide to Load Testing Microservices Architectures in Cloud Environments (2026 Edition)

Misconceptions about microservices load testing are common, especially for teams moving from monolithic systems. It’s tempting to believe that simply scaling infrastructure or running legacy load tests will reveal the same issues and provide actionable results. However, distributed, cloud-native architectures introduce new complexities and risks that demand a different approach.