These probes are excellent for assessing:
- The external performance of your public-facing website.
- What a customer in a major metropolitan area experience.
However, public probes have a critical limitation because they can’t see inside your network. They stop at the firewall, leaving a potential blind spot for the applications and infrastructure that truly power your business.
What is a Synthetic Private Probe, and Why Do I Need One?
A Synthetic Private Probe is a dedicated monitoring agent deployed directly in your network infrastructure. It allows you to monitor internally and externally hosted websites or Universal Resource Indicator (URI) entities from an exact vantage point.
Using a Synthetic Private Probe as a part of your Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) strategy directly addresses common challenges, such as:
- Monitoring behind a firewall: this provides availability metrics for internal applications, employee portals, or other crucial services that are not internet-facing.
- Gain a more complete understanding of a true user experience: pinpoint performance issues related to specific local networks or internal routing. This is more specific to the exact experience of a user from their location.
- Proactive root cause isolation: determine if a problem lies with your application, data center infrastructure, or an external service provider.
Synthetic Private Probes help you eliminate the guesswork. By extending your DEM reach into your network, you have additional information to work towards a consistent experience for all users.
A Use Case for Internal Monitoring with Synthetic Private Probes
Synthetic Private Probes can monitor the digital experience for your employees and back-office operations. Let’s take a look at two common use cases.
Internal Application Performance
Your workforce's productivity hinges on critical, often custom-built, internal applications, like an HR portal, custom finance dashboard, or proprietary CRM systems. Because these resources are securely hosted behind your firewall, they are entirely invisible to external public probes.
This creates a dangerous blind spot where performance issues can fester undetected, leading directly to employee frustration and lost work hours. The Synthetic Private Probe solves this by running scheduled synthetic tests that monitor the availability and response time. This capability allows you to proactively detect and resolve slowdowns in internal systems before they translate into costly downtime or a significant drop in employee efficiency.
Validating SaaS Performance from Your Network's Perspective
The modern enterprise relies heavily on mission-critical SaaS applications like Salesforce, Office 365, and Slack. A public probe can confirm that the SaaS vendor's service is generally available, but it cannot tell you if the performance is adequate for your employees. A Synthetic Private Probe deployed within your office location or data center can accurately measure the full user experience. It monitors the specific network path, latency, and performance of the SaaS application from your local network to the cloud.
This is a game-changer for diagnostics, because you can quickly and definitively diagnose whether performance degradation is an external issue or an internal one.
Unlocking Full Observability with Synthetic Private Probes in your Digital Experience Monitoring Strategy
Synthetic Private Probes are essential for closing the visibility gap left by external public monitoring. While public probes gauge external performance from standard locations, private probes allow you to monitor critical internal applications, firewalled resources, and unique internal network paths that dictate your employees' and customers' true digital experience. By deploying probes within your own network environment, you gain vital performance metrics from the inside out.
Beyond this primary use of monitoring internal networks, a secondary application of private probes involves extending your monitoring reach into specific, geographically isolated locations. For example, if your organization maintains a cloud location or a data center in a region like Spain, you can install a private probe there. This allows you to run synthetic tests directly from that point of presence, gaining critical insight into the performance experienced by customers or employees in that specific area. This can be a useful option for those looking to gain actionable visibility across your entire global infrastructure.
Deploy Synthetic Private Probes in SolarWinds Observability SaaS Digital Experience Monitoring
By integrating Synthetic Private Probe data into SolarWinds® Observability SaaS Digital Experience Monitoring, you gain additional metrics for enhanced correlation, allowing for faster incident response, more accurate root cause analysis, and a validated understanding of a user's actual digital experience internally and externally.
If you’re ready to deploy Synthetic Private Probes, visit our documentation page for a step-by-step walkthrough and to review system requirements.
