What Is Synthetic Monitoring?

• Synthetic Monitoring Definition

  Synthetic Monitoring Definition

  Synthetic monitoring, also known as active monitoring, runs automated scripts that simulate real user actions or behaviors to identify and fix website availability, application performance, and functionality issues before end users notice them.
• Key Features and Solution Characteristics of Synthetic Monitoring

  Key Features and Solution Characteristics of Synthetic Monitoring

  • Scripted User Journey Simulation: Synthetic monitoring enables the creation of scripts that mimic real user actions—from simple page loads to complex multi-step transactions—ensuring critical business workflows are continuously tested for functionality and reliability
  • Global Distributed Monitoring Agents: Effective solutions deploy monitoring agents across multiple geographic locations; these agents run scripts using real browsers and devices at regular intervals, capturing regional performance variations and enabling 24/7 coverage
  • Comprehensive Test Coverage: Robust platforms support various test types, such as availability checks, web performance monitoring, transaction simulations, and API endpoint testing; this breadth ensures all major aspects of the digital experience are proactively monitored
  • Intelligent Alerting and Detailed Reporting: Modern tools provide customizable alerts for failures or performance issues, often validating errors from multiple locations before escalation; they also offer dashboards and visualizations—such as waterfall charts and trend graphs—for rapid troubleshooting and long-term optimization
  • Integration and Automation Support: Leading solutions integrate with continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, incident management systems, and other monitoring tools, enabling automated testing after deployments and seamless incorporation into development operations workflows
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) Solutions: Many leading synthetic monitoring platforms are delivered as SaaS solutions; this model offers the advantage of zero infrastructure overhead for the user, as the vendor manages the global network of distributed monitoring agents and data storage—SaaS platforms typically provide easy browser-based access, rapid deployment, and automatic updates, making advanced monitoring capabilities accessible without requiring significant operational investment
• Types of Synthetic Monitoring

  Types of Synthetic Monitoring

  Synthetic monitoring helps you track and maintain the overall health and performance metrics of a web application by running simulated tests. Modern synthetic monitors act as emulated users or remote servers that frequently interact with your websites, APIs, or servers to test their performance and availability from different parts of the world. Such emulated users or remote servers mimic actual user behaviors while testing a particular web application. With this type of monitoring, you can test a web application before its release, minimize abandonment rates, and enhance the end-user experience. You can track your site 24/7 and receive timely alerts for performance and other issues before they reach end users. Combined with real user monitoring (RUM), you can get an accurate and full picture of your user experience.

  Active monitoring has three categories: uptime monitoring, transaction monitoring, and page speed monitoring. Most application monitors fall into these three categories:

  • Uptime monitoring (availability monitoring) is the most basic form of monitoring and helps examine whether a website, application, or server is accessible
  • Page speed monitoring is part of a web performance monitoring strategy and helps you track performance issues affecting the user experience and page load speeds, such as slow-responding content delivery networks and third-party content errors
  • Transaction monitoring aims to identify and fix errors in business-critical transactions on a website, such as cart checkout, by running simulated tests
    

  Uptime monitoring

  Uptime monitoring, also known as availability monitoring, helps track the accessibility and responsiveness of a web application. As a fundamental component of application performance monitoring, uptime monitors often use basic ping tests or GET requests to confirm the reachability of a website. Advanced availability monitors, such as synthetic monitors, can also check site accessibility from different global regions, which is critical for a business from a revenue standpoint. Availability monitoring tools can perform root cause analysis, helping you pinpoint the exact causes of site incidents and minimize error-resolution time. You can also configure alerts for site downtime or other critical issues using such monitors.

  Transaction monitoring

  Transaction monitoring makes synthetic monitors more effective by allowing you to verify almost every user interaction on your website or application, whether complex or simple, to ensure bug-free site functionality. For example, you can set up a simulated test to validate the form submission process on your website. Running a computer-driven, fabricated test will help trace and fix form submission-related problems before end users encounter them. Similarly, you can create test scripts for other transactions, such as signup, login, and cart checkout, to ensure critical paths or workflows in an application are error free. You can run such simulated tests at frequent intervals from different parts of the world using synthetic transaction monitoring.

  Page speed monitoring

  Nowadays, customers relate slow loading times to an application being unavailable. Google penalizes websites with poor loading times by downgrading their search engine results page positions. Web performance monitoring can help track website page speed and response times across different geolocations, browsers, and devices. You can monitor the load times of every element on the page through advanced visualizations, such as waterfall charts and filmstrip screenshots. This helps you identify which parts of a website need optimization to improve performance. You can assess the impact of recent changes on page load times with historical performance data and comprehensive visualizations using synthetic monitors. You can also group similar pages that are part of a single process, such as cart checkout, to monitor their aggregated performance using such tools.
• Benefits and Use Cases for Synthetic Monitoring Tools

  Benefits and Use Cases for Synthetic Monitoring Tools

  • Monitor site performance globally: Synthetic monitors can check your site availability and performance from different global regions, which is handy if your target audience belongs to a specific area; for instance, if your preferred customers reside in North America, synthetic monitors can help maintain 99.99% site uptime and fast load times in the area by continuously monitoring localized speed, performance, and other issues
  • Receive reliable, timely alerts: With synthetic monitors, you can receive prompt alerts via SMS, email, or third-party tools when site performance drops below expected benchmark levels, and you can set up such notifications on an individual or team basis to ensure quick remediation of site problems
  • Access advanced visualizations and reporting: Modern synthetic monitors can offer informative reports and data visualization features, such as filmstrip screenshots, to help you identify the main problem areas causing site slowdown; you can also share these site performance reports with customers and business partners to meet the defined service level agreements
  • Simulate real user interactions: With synthetic monitors, you can capture business-critical interactions on your website, from signup to cart checkout, via a web recorder, and you can convert these actions into test scripts to identify flaws in site functionality before users report them; alternatively, you can create manual scripts using the built-in editor tools of synthetic monitors for testing purposes
  • Analyze historical data and performance trends: Synthetic monitors can help analyze historical data to compare site performance over time, including availability, response times, and bounce rates; examining the impact of website changes or updates on performance is more straightforward with such insightful data
• Synthetic Monitoring versus Real User Monitoring

  Synthetic Monitoring versus Real User Monitoring

  Synthetic monitoring involves proactively deploying automated scripted agents from controlled locations globally to simulate critical user journeys, ensuring application uptime and availability without live traffic. This approach establishes a consistent performance baseline for key transactions and is excellent for catching regressions before they impact users, making it a crucial active signal within a broader observability strategy for validating expected system behavior.

  RUM is a passive method that collects performance data directly from the browsers of every end user, capturing the full spectrum of diverse network conditions, devices, and geolocations. This is essential for understanding the true field experience and diagnosing issues affecting specific user segments, providing crucial context synthetic tests cannot replicate.