We’re excited to announce the public preview of a powerful new capability in IBM Instana Observability: Synthetic Monitoring in CI/CD.

This feature enables you to reuse existing production synthetic tests directly within your CI/CD pipelines — bringing production‑grade performance, availability, and functionality checks earlier into your release cycle.

Why This Matters

Modern software teams are under constant pressure to deliver new features faster while maintaining reliability.

One common challenge: pre‑production test coverage often looks different from what’s monitored in production. This gap can lead to blind spots — and those blind spots can lead to regressions, performance degradation, and costly incidents.

With Synthetic Monitoring in CI/CD, you can:

• Apply the exact same synthetic tests and thresholds you use in production to your pre‑production builds.
• Automatically gate deployments based on test results.
• Maintain consistency across environments while improving release confidence.

Key Benefits

• Consistency – Eliminate discrepancies between pre‑production and production monitoring.
• Faster Feedback – Catch performance or availability issues before they hit production.
• Improved Maintainability – Update a single test definition that applies across all environments, instead of editing multiple versions.

How It Works

Synthetic Monitoring in CI/CD integrates easily with popular CI/CD platforms:

• Out‑of‑the‑box support: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps.
• Open APIs: Any CI/CD platform can call Instana to run selected synthetic tests and get pass/fail results during a build.
  • API: Create Synthetic Test in CI/CD
  • API: Create Synthetic Test

When a test fails in pre‑production:

• The pipeline will stop the deployment.
• Instana will provide detailed synthetic monitoring results to help you diagnose the issue before retrying.

Getting Started

1. Identify your existing production synthetic tests.
2. Integrate them into your CI/CD pipeline using the supported platforms or APIs.
3. Configure deployment gates to block releases if test assertions fail.
4. Monitor the results directly in Instana’s UI.

For API integration details, check out our documentation:

• Create Synthetic Test in CI/CD API.
• Create Synthetic Test API.

Join the Public Preview

This is your chance to test‑drive Synthetic Monitoring in CI/CD and help us shape the final release.

 We’re looking for feedback from SREs, DevOps engineers, and developers — especially around:

• Ease of integration with your existing pipelines.
• Impact on release confidence and velocity.
• Suggestions for future enhancements.

Co-authored with Dania Grave.

Start using Synthetic Monitoring in CI/CD today and bring production‑grade reliability checks into your build process.

If you are an existing Instana customer, you can start using this feature by creating a Synthetic Test using the CI/CD API.

If you are new to Instana, start you free 14-day trail to experience this feature by signing up here.