In this tutorial, we will learn about what is synthetic monitoring and
top 7 reasons to use the synthetic monitoring in your project
What is Synthetic monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring is also called active monitoring that helps you to monitor your applications by stimulating the users or traffic
periodically to collect the data of your application such as application uptime and performance.
The measured traffic is not of your real users; it is synthetically generated traffic.
7 Reasons to use Synthetic Monitoring
Provides End-User Perspective
Synthetic monitoring can proactively test your web, mobile, streaming, and SAAS applications in pre-production from the different geographical locations, different browsers running on real ISPs, and different devices.to make sure that performance will meet your end-users requirements.
The pre-production test data can be used as a baseline to set alert thresholds for performance in production in order to monitor performance and ensure the best end-user experience.
Application Availablity
Synthetic monitoring helps us to check the site’s availability and end-to-end performance 24/7 from the end-user perspective and be alerted to
issues before customers are affected.
Monitoring complex transactions and process
If you are striving to deliver high-level performance, it is not enough to check only application availability and uptime of your APIs. Synthetic monitoring (STM) allows you to emulate business processes and user transactions from the different geographies while testing from multiple browsers and devices.
For example, it can simulate logging in, adding items to cart, checking out, etc in order to measure performance. This allows you to compare stats between different locations and the steps involved in transactions. That gives you the necessary data to prepare for the performance improvement plans.
Test performance in advance of entering a new market
Synthetic monitoring allows you to test and identify, fix problems before deployment in key localities or new regions with real-world variables, such as connection speeds (DSL, broadband, fiber optics, etc).
When you are entering a new market it is important to know if performance and customer experience could impact the achievement of business goals. for example, expanding your product from the U.S. to the European market. Synthetic monitoring enables you to check the performance of your application from that geography and address the performance issues if any, before your real end-users encounter them.
Benchmarking your Performance
Synthetic monitoring provides you a valuable insight into how market leaders and the competition are performing. It also provides a context for shared goal-setting between IT and business mobile and website stakeholders to improve business results, and as a tool for measuring performance over time.
Baselining and Analyze Performance Trends
Synthetic monitoring provides you a stable and consistent environment
to measure application performance at all hours of the day, over a period of weeks or months. These baselines tests can monitor key transactions and geographic locations, while testing from multiple browsers and devices.
It is a best practice to improve your application performance and end-user experience.
Performance Impact of Third-party services
To provide good customer experiences, modern web or mobile applications mostly depend on third-party services like analytics, image hosting, ads, shopping carts, payment solutions, reviews, and other critical business functions. Synthetic monitoring enables the consumers of such third party services to monitor SLAs, performance loss, and unavailability incidents to keep the vendors accountable.
If you want to use synthetic monitoring for your next project
check out Sematext Synthentics tool that allows you to simulate user interactions and get ahead of performance issues before they impact your users.
Top comments (1)
Great article! I personally use AlertBot.com for my synthetic monitoring needs. I've been using them for over a decade now!