Marc Papazian
Staff Product Manager
Lauren Zuniga
Senior Product Marketing Manager
Younes Berradia
Product Manager
Synthetic test coverage usually grows one script at a time. Someone identifies a workflow that matters, writes the tests, and maintains them as the application changes. Coverage is limited to the journeys a team has already identified, and maintenance competes for time with feature development. Flows such as checkout, signup, login, and booking can go untested not because they are low risk, but because teams never had time to script them.
Bits Testing, generally available in Datadog Synthetic Monitoring, builds the coverage for you. Provide a starting URL, and an agent explores the application, identifies critical user journeys, and generates test suites for them.
This post covers how Bits Testing helps you:
Discover user journeys and generate synthetic tests automatically
Bits Testing autonomously interacts with frontend applications to map critical workflows and generate Synthetics tests for them. Instead of requiring you to define every click, form submission, or navigation event manually, the agent interacts with the application directly and records viable user paths as runnable test suites.
For example, you can point the agent at an ecommerce application and ask it to identify purchase-related workflows. The agent explores the site, navigates product listings, adds items to a cart, and proceeds through checkout flows to generate a collection of tests that represent real customer journeys. You can then review, accept, and schedule the generated tests like any other Synthetic Monitoring test. This expands coverage without the engineering time needed for manually scripting and testing updates.
Verify complete journeys instead of individual endpoints
A passing login test and a passing checkout test do not confirm that a customer can get from one to the other. Applications rarely fail at a single endpoint. A failure is more likely to appear in the handoff between the browser, the API serving it, and the network underneath. When those layers are tested separately, that failure can fall outside what any individual test covers.
Bits Testing generates browser, API, and network tests and groups them into Test Suites by workflow. A checkout suite can hold the browser test that walks the interface, the API tests covering the calls behind it, and the network tests that verify connectivity to the services involved. When a run fails, the result identifies the affected workflow, not just the individual test that failed.
Each suite also includes uptime service level objectives that require no configuration. These tell you how available that critical workflow has been over a 7-day window, giving you a reliability figure that factors test results across the layers of your system in one context.
Keep coverage current as your application changes
Coverage tends to drift: A Test Suite that was accurate at launch becomes less complete as features ship, and tests written against a previous layout can start failing on elements that moved rather than on functionality that broke. For applications that change frequently, triaging those failures adds overhead to every release, and repeated false failures can reduce confidence in the results.
Bits Testing accounts for the tests you already have. When the agent explores an application, it compares the workflows it finds against your existing coverage and generates tests for the paths that are not covered yet rather than duplicating the ones that are. As new features introduce new workflows, a discovery run extends your coverage to what changed instead of returning a second set of tests for what did not.
Self-healing tests address the other part of the problem. When a selector changes or a control moves, the test adapts to the interface at runtime instead of failing, so results reflect whether the workflow still works rather than whether the frontend changed. This helps keep triage focused on failures that indicate a problem in the product.
Start automating your test coverage with Bits Testing
Bits Testing helps you establish and maintain coverage for the workflows your application depends on. To create your first discovery run, provide a starting URL and describe the workflows you want the agent to explore.
To learn more, read the Bits Testing documentation for guidance on scoping discovery runs, reviewing generated tests, and scheduling suites.
If you don’t already have a Datadog account, sign up for a free 14-day trial to start automating your test coverage.
