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Talaia

Talaia

Talaia (Catalan): a watchtower.

Talaia is a synthetic smoke-test monitor: a last line of defense against production breakage. Scheduled black-box tests exercise the endpoints and journeys you choose against the live deployment. Start with public surfaces and add dedicated test-account flows for login, record creation or payment. Coverage is only as broad as those tests.

A health endpoint proves availability; a completed login test proves that login works. Talaia runs both kinds of checks and preserves that distinction.

What’s in the box

Section titled “What’s in the box”
  • Suites are plain pytest directories under projects/<project>/<suite>/ — API tests with httpx, browser tests with Playwright. No DSL.
  • Scheduler: supercronic inside Docker, one cron line per suite (from each suite.yml).
  • Storage: SQLite (WAL) — the single source of truth for runs, results and alert state.
  • Alerts: per-suite normal, high or emergency Pushover. Emergency failures are confirmed after 60 seconds; a successful confirmation sends a normal short-outage warning. See Alerting.
  • Footprint: per-run request/time measurements and warning budgets. See Footprint and scheduling.
  • UI: a read-only status page grouped by project, with a global healthy/total check count, a green/yellow/red status indicator, search, a Needs attention filter, saved collapse states and separate failure/staleness summaries (FastAPI + Jinja + locally bundled HTMX, no JS build). The global count covers all enabled suite scopes, even when filtered: green means all passed recently, red means at least one failed or errored, and yellow means results are stale, missing or skipped (or no checks are enabled). Results update in place every 60 seconds on the overview and every five minutes on suite details, preserving filters, collapsed groups, scroll and focus. Failed updates keep the previous results with a retry notice. Without JavaScript, reload manually for current results.
  • Metrics: a Prometheus /metrics endpoint, plus an optional mirror to InfluxDB v2 for Grafana dashboards. See Metrics.
  • Heartbeats: optional healthchecks.io ping per suite — a dead-man switch that alerts you if Talaia itself stops running.

Safety first

Section titled “Safety first”

Talaia’s suites hit production on purpose, so the golden rules are non-negotiable: only ever use a dedicated test account, prefix created data with SMOKE- and clean it up, and put an explicit safety gate in front of any write flow. Flows that leave undeletable data belong in low-frequency suites, never in the every-10-minutes ones. Details in Writing a suite.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”
  • Getting started — discuss access and verify a local installation safely.
  • Writing a suite — suite.yml reference and conventions.
  • Deployment — the two-container Docker Compose setup.
  • Living Specs — the upcoming flagship: LLM-authored, self-healing browser tests (design stage).