SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor

Web Performance Monitor

Name: Web Performance Monitor
Brand: SolarWinds

Website monitoring software built to find and fix internal and external site and app performance issues.

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Fully functional for 30 days

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What is web performance monitor?

A web performance monitor is software designed to continuously track website availability, speed, and functional workflows by simulating real user transactions from multiple locations.

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Web Application Monitoring

Web Server Performance Monitoring

End-To-End Monitoring

Digital Experience Monitoring

Manage your virtual environment with web performance monitoring

Take control of your web application performance with SolarWinds^® Web Performance Monitor (WPM). SolarWinds WPM goes beyond basic website monitoring software, recording complex user paths, analyzing front end assets, and mapping front end issues to back end infrastructure health.

SolarWinds WPM Transaction Details dashboard showing synthetic transaction monitoring charts, step times, and error alerts.

Monitor web and SaaS application performance

Web performance management across multi-department, multi-customer environments

Monitor web and SaaS application performance across multi-department, multi-customer environments. Know if slow web services are affecting user experience with website monitoring tools. Web Performance Monitor provides visibility and control over testing websites and web applications, including from an end-user perspective.

Centralize performance testing across departments, customers, websites, and SaaS applications.
Compare performance across environments to identify issues and prioritize the right actions.
Connect service performance data with end-user experience to understand the impact of slow web services.

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Detailed load time metrics

Run website speed tests from multiple locations

Identify and resolve slow webpage elements that affect overall performance with website speed monitoring. Monitoring load times from end-user locations is essential for maintaining the performance of critical web-based apps or websites.

Test from internal, external, and cloud-hosted locations
Compare response times across regions to isolate local issues
Diagnose latency affecting performance

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TCP Waterfall Chart in SolarWinds WPM analyzing resource latency, DNS lookup, and time to first byte per web step.

Synthetic transaction monitoring recorder showing recorded user workflow steps beside a live status topology map.

Responsive design

Web user experience monitoring

Test end-user experience based on the screen resolution of the device used to access your website or web application. Responsive design allows users to set specific resolutions in the web transaction recorder to emulate different device screens and monitor the associated user experiences.

Evaluate how responsive designs perform across user environments
Identify screen-specific usability and performance issues before they affect real users
Compare transaction results across resolutions to support more consistent web user experiences

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Informative performance reporting

Best practices for monitoring website uptime and performance

Generate out-of-the-box and custom website performance reports, including page load speeds, transaction health, and website uptime. With Web Performance Monitor, extend these reports with website response time monitoring, website speed monitoring, website availability monitoring, and synthetic monitoring data to identify performance trends across critical user journeys. Share clear, actionable insights with technical teams and business stakeholders to support faster troubleshooting and more effective web performance management.

Monitor page load speeds, response times, uptime, and transaction health from unified reports
Customize reports to highlight the website performance metrics that matter most to your teams and users.
Identify trends, validate improvements, and support proactive website monitoring

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Website monitoring software report listing synthetic transaction durations and operational statuses by location.

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted PerfStack dashboard showing IIS, alerts, database metrics, and more in one view.

Integrated web monitoring with SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted

Boost web performance insights with SolarWinds Observability integration

Monitor web performance with WPM, fully integrated into your observability platform. By integrating WPM with SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted, you can view web performance data alongside server, network, and application performance monitoring metrics. This comprehensive visibility helps you quickly identify and address web issues, improving the end-user experience and reducing downtime in your hybrid IT environment.

Correlate web performance data with server, network, and application metrics in one observability platform.
Troubleshoot issues faster by connecting end-user experience with underlying infrastructure and application performance.
Improve service availability and reduce downtime across hybrid IT environments with comprehensive performance visibility.

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Get the full WPM datasheet

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Get more on website performance monitoring

Mechanics behind transaction monitoring and infrastructure correlation

How synthetic transaction monitoring works
Monitoring from multiple locations
Understanding load-time metrics
Connecting web performance to infrastructure
Recording transactions without scripting

How synthetic transaction monitoring works

Synthetic transaction monitoring is the practice of using scripted, automated interactions to test critical website and web application workflows—such as logging in, searching, or completing a transaction—from defined locations and devices. WPM uses a no-code transaction recorder to capture the steps a user takes in a web application, including mouse clicks, text input, file downloads, and text string matching. Once recorded, the transaction is assigned to one or more playback locations and replayed at regular intervals, every five minutes by default. Each playback measures the response time of every step in the transaction. If any step exceeds the configured threshold or fails entirely, WPM triggers an alert so you can investigate immediately. This continuous synthetic and active monitoring approach means you are testing critical user journeys like login, search, checkout, and form submission around the clock, even when no real users are active. By running the same transaction repeatedly from the same locations, you build a performance baseline that makes it easy to spot anomalies and track trends over time. The result is proactive detection of slowdowns and failures before they impact real users.

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How synthetic transaction monitoring works
Synthetic transaction monitoring is the practice of using scripted, automated interactions to test critical website and web application workflows—such as logging in, searching, or completing a transaction—from defined locations and devices. WPM uses a no-code transaction recorder to capture the steps a user takes in a web application, including mouse clicks, text input, file downloads, and text string matching. Once recorded, the transaction is assigned to one or more playback locations and replayed at regular intervals, every five minutes by default. Each playback measures the response time of every step in the transaction. If any step exceeds the configured threshold or fails entirely, WPM triggers an alert so you can investigate immediately. This continuous synthetic and active monitoring approach means you are testing critical user journeys like login, search, checkout, and form submission around the clock, even when no real users are active. By running the same transaction repeatedly from the same locations, you build a performance baseline that makes it easy to spot anomalies and track trends over time. The result is proactive detection of slowdowns and failures before they impact real users.
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Website Monitoring Software Integrations

WPM works as a standalone web performance monitoring tool and integrates with SolarWinds products for deeper full-stack visibility.

SolarWinds Pingdom

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted

Trusted by thousands

What our customers say

It’s all with the goal of trying to get further down the path of effective monitoring but also to make it easier for my team to find issues. And that’s where having all that data in here is really important for us.

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Anonymous

Information Systems Network Administrator

Public Land Management Agency

Web performance monitoring FAQ

How can I monitor my website performance?

How to monitor website performance

Use a web performance monitor to continuously test your website's availability, speed, and functionality from the locations your users access it. SolarWinds WPM records and replays synthetic transactions like login, search, and checkout on a schedule, alerting you the moment any step slows or fails. This proactive approach catches issues before users report them.

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What should a web performance monitor measure?

Key metrics for web performance monitoring

A web performance monitor should measure website availability, page load times, transaction completion rates, and individual element performance. It should also track DNS lookup, connection time, time to first byte, and content download time for each page. SolarWinds WPM captures all of these metrics and breaks them down by location, transaction step, and page element for thorough analysis.

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What is the difference between website monitoring and web performance monitoring?

Website monitoring vs. web performance monitoring

Website monitoring typically checks whether a site is up or down, focusing on availability. Web performance monitoring goes further by measuring how fast pages load, how individual elements perform, and whether multi-step user transactions complete successfully. SolarWinds WPM covers both, combining website availability monitoring with detailed load-time metrics and synthetic testing for a complete picture.

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What is synthetic web performance monitoring?

Synthetic web performance monitoring explained

Synthetic web performance monitoring simulates real user interactions with a website or web application by recording and replaying transactions on a schedule. Instead of waiting for real users to encounter problems, synthetic monitoring proactively tests critical workflows like login, search, and checkout from multiple locations, alerting teams when performance degrades or transactions fail.

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Can web performance monitoring detect failed user transactions?

Detecting failed user transactions

Yes. SolarWinds WPM records multi-step user transactions such as login, checkout, and form submission and replays them continuously. If any step in the transaction fails or exceeds your configured time threshold, WPM sends an alert immediately. This means you can detect a broken checkout flow or a failing login process before customers report it.

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How can you identify what is slowing down a website?

Identifying website slowdowns

Use a web performance monitor with TCP waterfall charts to break down page load times by element. SolarWinds WPM shows exactly how long each component, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and third-party plugins, takes to load, along with DNS lookup, connection, and download times. This pinpoints the specific element causing the delay so you can fix it directly.

What should I look for in website monitoring software?

Choosing a website monitoring tool

Look for a website performance monitoring tool that supports synthetic monitoring, multi-location testing, no-code transaction recording, customizable alerting, and detailed load-time reporting.

The best website monitoring software also correlates web performance with underlying infrastructure, so you can trace a slow transaction to its root cause without switching between tools. SolarWinds WPM delivers all of these capabilities as a standalone solution. Synthetic monitoring uses scripted tests to proactively measure website and web application performance under consistent conditions, helping teams detect issues before users encounter them. Real user monitoring (RUM), by contrast, captures performance data from actual visitors as they use a website, providing insight into how factors such as device, browser, location, and network affect the user experience. Use synthetic monitoring to validate availability and critical transactions, and explore Pingdom for real user monitoring capabilities and insights from live visitor experiences.

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Features of the SolarWinds^® Orion^® module, Web Performance Monitor (WPM), are also available as part of
Observability Self-Hosted. Contact Sales for a custom quote.