Synthetic Monitoring is an active approach to testing a website or web service by simulating visitor requests to test for availability, performance, and function.
Synthetic Monitoring is a generic term applied to many different types of website and server monitoring solutions. Synthetic monitors operate like bots that connect to websites, web services, APIs, and servers to verify availability, function, and performance using a network of checkpoints external to the website’s own servers from various parts of the network or world.
Why to use Synthetic Monitoring?
Any company or brand that provides content or services through a network or the Internet needs Synthetic Monitoring to protect productivity, revenue, and reputation. When availability and performance are mission critical, a brand can’t wait for end-users to notify them of a problem. By the time end users begin to complain, it is too late. The brand has taken on damage due to the problems, and until the problem is resolved, the brand’s reputation and revenue suffer.
Faster problem resolution
Content and supporting technology change continuously and the slightest change to the site or infrastructure can bring any brand to its knees if not everything goes as planned. Poor performance and outages appear quickly when using Synthetic Monitoring. Instant access to detailed reports about an error (sometimes with screenshots), allow teams to respond quickly. Often teams can find the root cause and implement a fix before the end users become aware.
Alerting
Alerts should happen before end users experience problems with a site or service. Although some passive approaches to monitoring include alerting, Synthetic Monitoring’s proactive approach works well for alerting a team to issues early. Synthetic Monitoring can check and verify many details and identify situations before they become problems such as reduced performance from a database server.
Tracking third-party content
Third party content comes in many different forms, e.g., advertising, payment management systems, CDNs, and analytic solutions. The performance of these third-party vendors affects the performance of the host site. Using an independent monitoring service allows brands to hold their third-party vendors accountable for their product’s availability and performance.
SLAs and Synthetic Monitoring
Besides performance and function, companies use Synthetic Monitoring to validate SLAs (Service Level Agreement). Detailed reports allow companies the ability to show the exact availability percentage for any given period. Some companies use the reports to provide proof to their customers that they have met the obligations of their SLA, other companies use the reports to track the availability of websites and services on which they rely.
Seven reasons why you need synthetic monitoring?
Find and fix issues before they impact your end users
Synthetic monitoring helps you emulate user interactions and run them as tests from global monitoring locations or from behind your firewall. Synthetic monitoring proactively watches over your APIs, websites, web, mobile and SaaS applications, even during the low-traffic periods, and alerts your operations team in case of performance degradation or availability issues. So you get enough bandwidth to identify the problem, engage subject matter experts, find the root cause and fix issues before they impact the end users.
Prepare for the peak traffic season or a new market
Synthetic monitoring gives you a unique ability to monitor the area of your website or application which doesn’t have real user traffic yet. Imagine a new marketing campaign driving traffic to a new area of the application. Synthetic monitoring allows you to proactively simulate traffic to that area and help you ensure availability and performance. The other use case is when you are launching your services in a new geography. Synthetic monitoring enables you to check your applications performance from that geography and address performance issues, if any, before your real end users encounter them
Baseline and Benchmark
Synthetic monitoring gives you the ability to monitor your APIs and applications at frequency and location(s) of your choice, at all times. Over time, this monitoring data can be used for baselining your application’s performance, identifying areas of improvement and developing performance improvement strategies. You can also use synthetic monitoring to benchmark your applications availability and performance with your historic self or against competitors. Measure and Adhere to
SLAs
Service level agreements are critical to modern business. No matter what side of the SLA you are, measuring and adhering to the agreed upon level of service is beneficial for both client and vendor parties. For vendors, synthetic monitoring helps understand the availability and performance limitations of the application better. Armed with this data, vendors can set up realistic service level objectives and avoid unforeseen penalties.
Monitor complex transactions and business processes
Only checking availability and uptime of your APIs and applications is not sufficient when you are striving to deliver a high quality application performance. Synthetic monitoring allows you to emulate business processes or user transactions such as logging in, searching, filling form, adding items to cart and check out etc. from different geographies, and monitor their performance. You can then compare performance stats between geographies and steps in the transactions and formulate your performance improvement plans.
Hold your 3rd party vendors accountable
Modern applications depend on multiple 3rd party components for functionality and data. The most common 3rd party integrations are CDNs, payment processing solutions, site search and recommendations plugins, business intelligence and analytics solutions etc. Synthetic monitoring enables the consumers of such 3rd party services to monitor service level objectives, performance degradation and unavailability incidents to hold the vendors accountable.
Test from the end users perspective
By monitoring your website or applications at the real browser level, where all the dynamic components of your applications come together, synthetic monitoring enables you to measure the true end user experience. The monitors are run from different geographical locations, different browsers running on real internet service providers and devices. Such realistic monitoring provides insight into response time components and the end user experience metrics such as page load, DOM load, first paint and above the fold. By testing your websites and applications from the end users perspective, you can be ready for all diverse user scenarios.
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