For simpler projects I generally look at top stats on the server and monitor resources used per page/request type.

This is really interesting when you turn things on like caching, and also really good for when you don’t have much control over the software used - eg, when you use Wordpress, Discourse or other 3rd party software.

Monitoring is an interesting area of tools too!

But I was thinking more of tooling which you’d be using before your application hits production. Anything from ensuring it can handle the expected load, verifying that API endpoints don’t behave unexpectedly when receiving garbage data, performing UI tests, to checking data sent to third-party services.

To speak in concrete terms, here are some tools I know of (but haven’t necessarily used) which fall into this category:

• https://www.cypress.io/ (ui testing)
• https://k6.io/ (load testing)
• https://citrusframework.org/ (integration & end2end testing)
• I don’t have any fuzz testing examples but there is an awesome-fuzzing repo with a bunch of tools

Is there any tool you’re using in this category, @AstonJ?

We’re currently using Selenium (legacy) for UI testing before deploys. We’re investigating Selenium WebDriver as an alternative, but it’s slow going as we’re bottlenecked in dev at the moment.