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E2E Testing

Unit tests and smoke tests catch encoding and sink errors, but they don't prove that data survives the full journey from Sonda through your backend to a query API. The tests/e2e/ directory contains a Docker Compose-based test suite that validates Sonda against real observability backends and message brokers.

Prerequisites

  • Docker with the Compose v2 plugin (docker compose)
  • Task (optional, for convenient commands)
  • curl and python3 in PATH
  • Rust toolchain (for cargo build)

Disk space

The e2e tests build Sonda in release mode. Make sure you have sufficient disk space for the Rust target directory (~2 GB).

Services

The e2e stack runs these services alongside Sonda:

Service Port Purpose
VictoriaMetrics 8428 Push target and query endpoint
Prometheus 9090 Remote write receiver
vmagent 8429 Relay agent forwarding to VictoriaMetrics
Kafka 9094 Kafka broker (KRaft mode, no Zookeeper)
Kafka UI 8080 Browse topics and messages
Grafana 3000 Pre-configured datasources for VM, Prometheus, and Loki
Loki 3100 Log aggregation push target

Test Scenarios

Each scenario pushes data through a specific encoder/sink combination, then the test runner queries the backend to verify the data arrived.

VictoriaMetrics (verified by querying /api/v1/series):

Scenario file Encoder Sink target Metric verified
vm-prometheus-text.yaml prometheus_text VM /api/v1/import/prometheus sonda_e2e_vm_prom_text
vm-influx-lp.yaml influx_lp VM /write sonda_e2e_vm_influx_lp_value

Kafka (verified by consuming from topic):

Scenario file Encoder Kafka topic Verification
kafka-prometheus-text.yaml prometheus_text sonda-e2e-metrics messages > 0
kafka-json-lines.yaml json_lines sonda-e2e-json messages > 0

All scenario files live in tests/e2e/scenarios/.

Running Automated Tests

The fastest way to run the full suite:

task e2e

./tests/e2e/run.sh

The script starts the Docker Compose stack, waits for all services to become healthy, builds Sonda in release mode, runs each scenario, verifies data arrived (VictoriaMetrics via series API, Kafka via consumer), and tears everything down. Exit code 0 means all passed.

For more control, use the individual Taskfile commands.

Using the Taskfile

The project Taskfile provides shortcuts for common operations:

task stack:up       # Start the full e2e stack
task stack:down     # Stop and remove everything
task stack:status   # Show service status
task stack:logs     # Tail all service logs

task e2e            # Run automated e2e tests (starts/stops stack)
task demo           # Start stack + send a 30s sine wave demo

task run:vm-prom    # Send Prometheus text metrics to VictoriaMetrics
task run:vm-influx  # Send InfluxDB LP metrics to VictoriaMetrics
task run:kafka      # Send metrics to Kafka
task run:loki       # Send log events to Loki

Mix and match

Use task stack:up to start the stack, then run individual task run:* commands to test specific encoder/sink combinations without tearing down between runs.

Exploring Metrics Visually

Start the stack and generate some data:

task stack:up
task demo

Then open the dashboards:

Dashboards are great for exploration. For repeatable manual tests, run scenarios individually.

Running Scenarios Manually

# Start the stack
task stack:up

# Run individual scenarios
sonda metrics --scenario tests/e2e/scenarios/vm-prometheus-text.yaml
sonda metrics --scenario tests/e2e/scenarios/kafka-prometheus-text.yaml

# Verify VictoriaMetrics received data
curl "http://localhost:8428/api/v1/series?match[]={__name__=%22sonda_e2e_vm_prom_text%22}"

# Verify Kafka received messages
docker exec sonda-e2e-kafka kafka-console-consumer.sh \
    --bootstrap-server 127.0.0.1:9092 \
    --topic sonda-e2e-metrics \
    --from-beginning --timeout-ms 5000

# Tear down
task stack:down

Next Steps

Testing alert rules? Start with Alert Testing.

Validating alert rules in CI/CD? See CI Alert Validation.

Quick pipeline smoke tests (no Docker)? See Pipeline Validation.

Browsing all example scenarios? See Example Scenarios.