Apica: Scaling pre-and-post-prod customer experience assurance

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

An old maxim from my software QA days was that no matter how many automated tests you run, your application will never survive without some manual user acceptance testing (UAT) and load testing.

Apica is turning this maxim on its head with an automated service level assurance platform that can elastically scale environments and tests, by starting from observed real user behaviors and synthetic monitoring of API traffic and contextual data moving between users, applications and services.

Their concept of a ‘transaction’ goes beyond checking request/response pairs between two systems, to present a holistic consideration of the stateful nature of a multi-step customer journey, where success or failure is not simply a specific indicator appearing on the screen, but a validation of customer results with confirmed processes and data entries along the way.

Obviously, dealing with a high degree of data variability is essential here, as there are an infinite number of possible paths to failure, especially in today’s highly distributed application flows. The company accounts for this by saving production usage and environment profiles, providing pre-loadable event scenarios, and even generating a bit of random ‘chaos’ when called for.

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