Multistep API tests allow you to chain several HTTP requests at once to proactively monitor and ensure that the sophisticated journeys on your key services are available at anytime, and from anywhere. If you want to perform single requests to your services, leverage API tests.
You can accomplish the following:
If one of your services starts answering more slowly, or in an unexpected way (for example, unexpected response body or status code), your test can alert your team, block your CI pipeline, or even roll back the faulty deployment.
Multistep API tests can run from Datadog managed locations and private locations, allowing full coverage of your systems, both external and internal.
env and other tags to your Multistep API test. You can use these tags to quickly filter through your Synthetic tests on the Synthetic Monitoring homepage.Select the Locations for your Multistep API test. Multistep API tests can run from both managed and private locations depending on your preference for running the test from outside or inside your network.
To create an HTTP request step, click Create Your First Step.
By default, you can create up to 10 test steps. To increase this limit, contact Datadog Support.
Name your step.
Choose the HTTP Method and specify the URL to query. Available methods are: GET, POST, PATCH, PUT, HEAD, DELETE, and OPTIONS. Both http and https URLs are supported.
Enrich your HTTP request with Advanced Options (optional):
user-agent header).<COOKIE_NAME1>=<COOKIE_VALUE1>; <COOKIE_NAME2>=<COOKIE_VALUE2>.x-amz-content-sha256 containing the sha256-encoded body of the request as a header (for an empty body: x-amz-content-sha256: e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855).text/plain, application/json, text/xml, text/html, application/x-www-form-urlencoded, GraphQL, or None) you want to add to your HTTP request.http://<YOUR_USER>:<YOUR_PWD>@<YOUR_IP>:<YOUR_PORT>).Click Test URL to try out the request configuration. A response preview appears.
Assertions define what an expected test result is. After you click Test URL, basic assertions on response time, status code, and header content-type are added based on the response that was obtained. Assertions are optional in multistep API tests.
| Type | Operator | Value type |
|---|---|---|
| body | contains, does not contain, is, is not,matches, does not match,jsonpath, xpath | String Regex String, Regex |
| header | contains, does not contain, is, is not,matches, does not match | String Regex |
| response time | is less than | Integer (ms) |
| status code | is, is not | Integer |
HTTP tests can decompress bodies with the following content-encoding headers: br, deflate, gzip, and identity.
If a test does not contain an assertion on the response body, the body payload drops and returns an associated response time for the request within the timeout limit set by the Synthetics Worker.
If a test contains an assertion on the response body and the timeout limit is reached, an Assertions on the body/response cannot be run beyond this limit error appears.
You can create up to 20 assertions per step by clicking New Assertion or by clicking directly on the response preview.
Click Continue with test if this step fails to allow your test to move on with subsequent steps after step failure. This ensures your tests are able to clean up after themselves. For example, a test may create a resource, perform a number of actions on that resource, and end with the deletion of that resource.
In case one of the intermediary steps fail, you want to have this setting enabled on every intermediary step to ensure that the resource is deleted at the end of the test and that no false positives are created.
The test generates an alert if an endpoint does not answer as expected. Your test can trigger retries X times after Y ms in case of a failed test result. Customize the retry interval to suit your alerting sensibility.
Optionally, extract variables from the response of your HTTP request by parsing its response headers or body. The value of the variable updates each time the HTTP request step runs.
To start parsing a variable, click Extract a variable from response content:
Enter a Variable Name. Your variable name can only use uppercase letters, numbers, and underscores and must have at least three characters.
Decide whether to extract your variable from the response headers or from the response body.
You can extract up to ten variables per test step. Once created, this variable can be used in the following steps of your multistep API test. For more information, see Use variables.
Multistep API tests can run:
Set alert conditions to determine the circumstances under which you want a test to fail and trigger an alert.
When you set the alert conditions to: An alert is triggered if any assertion fails for X minutes from any n of N locations, an alert is triggered only if these two conditions are true:
Your test can trigger retries X times after Y ms in case of a failed test result. Customize the retry interval to suit your alerting sensibility.
Location uptime is computed on a per-evaluation basis (whether the last test result before evaluation was up or down). The total uptime is computed based on the configured alert conditions. Notifications sent are based on the total uptime.
A notification is sent by your test based on the alerting conditions previously defined. Use this section to define how and what to message your team.
Similar to monitors, select users and/or services that should receive notifications either by adding an @notification to the message or by searching for team members and connected integrations with the drop-down box.
Enter the notification message for your test. This field allows standard Markdown formatting and supports the following conditional variables:
| Conditional Variable | Description |
|---|---|
{{#is_alert}} | Show when the test alerts. |
{{^is_alert}} | Show unless the test alerts. |
{{#is_recovery}} | Show when the test recovers from alert. |
{{^is_recovery}} | Show unless the test recovers from alert. |
Specify how often you want your test to re-send the notification message in case of test failure. To prevent renotification on failing tests, leave the option as Never renotify if the monitor has not been resolved.
Click Create to save your test configuration and monitor.
For more information, see Using Synthetic Test Monitors.
In addition to creating local variables, you can extract variables from any step of your multistep API test and re-inject the values in subsequent steps.
To create a local variable, click Create a Local Variable at the top right hand corner. You can select one of the following available builtins:
{{ numeric(n) }}n digits.{{ alphabetic(n) }}n letters.{{ alphanumeric(n) }}n characters.{{ date(n unit, format) }}n units.{{ timestamp(n, unit) }}n units.To obfuscate local variable values in test results, select Hide and obfuscate variable value. Once you have defined the variable string, click Add Variable.
You can use the global variables defined in the Settings and the locally defined variables in the URL, advanced options, and assertions of your HTTP tests.
To display your list of variables, type {{ in your desired field.
A test is considered FAILED if a step does not satisfy one or several assertions or if a step’s request prematurely failed. In some cases, the test can indeed fail without being able to test the assertions against the endpoint, these reasons include:
CONNREFUSEDCONNRESETDNSINVALID_REQUESTSSLTIMEOUTTIMEOUT can happen:TIMEOUT: The request couldn’t be completed in a reasonable time. indicates that the request duration hit the test defined timeout (default is set to 60s).
For each request only the completed stages for the request are displayed in the network waterfall. For example, in the case of Total response time only being displayed, the timeout occurred during the DNS resolution.TIMEOUT: Overall test execution couldn't be completed in a reasonable time. indicates that the request and assertions duration hit the maximum duration (60.5s).MALFORMED_RESPONSEBy default, only users with the Datadog Admin and Datadog Standard roles can create, edit, and delete Synthetic multistep API tests. To get create, edit, and delete access to Synthetic multistep API tests, upgrade your user to one of those two default roles.
If you are using the custom role feature, add your user to any custom role that includes synthetics_read and synthetics_write permissions for Synthetic Monitoring.
Access restriction is available for customers using custom roles on their accounts.
You can restrict access to a multistep API test based on the roles in your organization. When creating a multistep API test, choose which roles (in addition to your user) can read and write your test.
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
