Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

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.

The request timed out after five seconds. The application said context deadline exceeded. The dependency was healthy, its dashboards were green, and its own latency histogram showed nothing above 30 milliseconds.

AI chatbots are transforming how people interact with digital products, but they also introduce new accessibility challenges.

Design, document, and verify APIs across OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, GraphQL, and MCP. gRPC and A2A support coming soon.

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.

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.

Every SRE team operates services it cannot see into: a vendor binary, an inherited legacy deployment, a container whose owning team dissolved two reorgs ago. The routes are undocumented, the dependencies are unknown, and when a request takes 130 milliseconds nobody can say whether that time is application work or a wait across a network boundary.

Over the past twelve months, something has shifted in how software teams think about quality. Claude Code, Cursor, and Playwright agents have made it genuinely easy to generate functional tests without deep automation expertise. The impact is showing up across two very different kinds of teams: Both paths lead to the same place: tests accumulate without governance, you get coverage without traceability, and there’s automation debt no one owns. But coverage numbers and quality are not the same thing.