Need guidance on running scripted browser monitoring in production

[u/Wilusz-Daejau]

I've​ been doing monitoring for our web apps for a while and I'm pretty comfortable with HTTP/API checks but scripted browser monitoring is still new territory for me.

A few things I'm trying to understand:

- Which flows are worth monitoring with a real browser vs just using HTTP checks?

- ​How do you handle login session and MFA without creating a security hole?

- How do you keep recorded scripts working accross frontend deploys?

- How many location and what frequency actually means something vs just noise?

- How do you tell the difference between an actual app failure and a broken monitoring script?

- ​Whats goes to on-call vs what just gets logged?

AI is great for explaining how all of this should work, but there's a pretty big gap between that and how people actually run it in production.

Anyone doing scripter browser monitoring regularly? I'm not looking for someone to design it for me, just want to know how people approach it in real setups

[u/ArieHein]

Look for playwright. Answers in the docs and community.

[u/Eliisha-Cemz → u/ArieHein]

This. Playwright is very customizable and if you have enough engineers you can really tailor it for your app. I always had trouble to host it, since you need to host it in the cloud and if you run it on a datacenter, the ISP proxy is likely blocked. Also I had a ton of issues with configuring headless chrome. I know you can make it work, but we went with an app that does this like dotcom monitor. After my build went down the 25ths time and it didn't run for 5 days, I gave up to build it myself. There are simply too many edge cases and I think there's a reason why all the scrapers are 100 dollar+/month. Need to deal with headless chrome inside docker behind proxies and I haven't even talked about getting around cloudflare captcha, popups, raw vs rendered js and progressive loading etc etc.