What is synthetic monitoring, and how does it work?

What is synthetic monitoring? How emulating user paths improves outcomes

It’s critical to ensure that your applications are always functional to provide your customers with a high-quality digital experience. Synthetic monitoring can help you validate that your applications are working as they should, and if they aren’t, it can help you figure out why. Although synthetic monitoring tools have become an essential aspect of application performance monitoring, not all solutions are suitable for all applications or produce the best results.

As current cloud infrastructures evolve, the methods consumers engage with your applications are changing. We’ll go into how various forms of monitoring function later, but first, some background information.

What is synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring, often referred to as synthetic testing, evaluates application performance that simulates users’ routes when interacting with software. It uses scripts to affect user behavior for various scenarios, geographical regions, device types, and other variables.

A synthetic monitoring solution can do the following after gathering and analyzing this crucial performance data:

• Provide you with critical information on how effectively your application is performing. 
• Keep track of application uptime and get reports on how your app reacts to typical user behavior. 
• Concentrate on specific business processes, such as notifying you of any issues customers may encounter when making a purchase or filling out a web form.

How does synthetic monitoring work?

A robot client application placed on a browser, device, or computer transmits a series of automatic transactions to your application in simulated monitoring. These server calls and testing scripts mimic an end user’s clickstream as they travel through your application’s central regions. They typically run every 15 minutes, but you can set them to run at different intervals or immediately in response to a specific activity.

After receiving a response from your application, the robot client sends the information to the synthetic monitoring system. The monitoring system will ask the client to conduct the test again if it detects a mistake during its regularly scheduled simulated tests. If the follow-up test also yields an error, the monitoring system will treat the issue as confirmed and escalate it as necessary across the business.

Synthetic monitoring systems can be configured in various ways to meet the needs of a firm. For example, you can install a robot client on a machine behind your firewall to ensure that the internal environment operates as intended. Alternatively, you can install a robot client on a computer outside the firewall to determine how well an application is doing. You can configure several robot clients on browsers in different places if you want a complete picture of application availability and performance.

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Synthetic monitoring vs. real user monitoring

Synthetic monitoring is frequently contrasted with accurate user monitoring, another application performance strategy (RUM). As the name suggests, RUM tracks rather than simulate actual user actions. RUM is frequently implemented by injecting JavaScript code into a web page and then gathering performance data in the background while real users interact with it.

So, what exactly is synthetic monitoring used for, and when should a company choose RUM instead? Synthetic monitoring is frequently helpful in detecting short-term performance concerns that may influence the user experience while an application is still being developed. Early detection aids businesses in preventing future performance concerns. This method is useful for regression testing and monitoring production sites. On the other hand, it can assist a company in determining long-term patterns in an application’s performance after it has been implemented.

Why use synthetic monitoring?

If your application fails to meet your consumers’ expectations when they try to use it, they will immediately leave in search of a better customer experience. It might go in several directions. Consider the following scenario:

• Bounce rates are high. Your website may take excessive time to load, resulting in a high bounce rate. Alternatively, you could be lagging behind your competition in terms of app performance without even realizing it. It will make it difficult for you to gain new clients and expand your market share. 
• Troubleshooting is difficult. Even if your company is aware that something is wrong with one of its applications, it might not know where to start troubleshooting. IT teams aren’t always able to figure out what’s wrong with application performance, especially when they’re busy and juggling several responsibilities. And while your employees are left in the dark and searching for answers, your company’s bottom line could suffer an instant and enormous hit. 

You can avoid these problems by simulating user behavior routes in a test environment.

• Keep a close eye on the system’s health. A synthetic monitor can tell you if your site is up and running, how fast it is, if critical transactions are performing correctly, and where a potential slowdown or failure might arise.
• Enhance your performance. Synthetic monitoring can provide you with performance benchmarks over time, identifying areas where you can improve and optimize. 
• Prevent problems before they arise. Synthetic monitoring can also be used to discover and solve possible faults before they affect your users, hence improving the user experience. It is especially beneficial in scenarios where continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) are used. 
• Boost your resiliency. Synthetic monitoring can also aid in planning for high traffic periods or anticipating performance requirements in a new market or location. 

Synthetic monitoring solutions can also help ensure that your end-users service level agreements (SLAs) are being met. If a problem arises with a third-party provider, you’ll be better prepared to hold them accountable.

Types of synthetic monitoring

There are three forms of synthetic monitoring: availability monitoring, web performance monitoring, and transaction monitoring.

• Availability monitoring allows a company to verify that a website or application is up and running and responding to queries. Monitoring for availability can also take a more detailed approach, such as ensuring that particular material is available or that a specific API call is successful. 
• Web performance monitoring focuses on specific web metrics like page load speed and the performance of individual web items. It looks for broken links, problems, and slow response times on the web. 
• Transaction monitoring tries to complete certain transactions like logging in, filling out a form, and paying for something. 

There are two primary sorts of synthetic testing in the domain of synthetic monitoring:

• Browser testing – a robot client acts as a user and simulates a transaction (such as making a purchase) 
• API tests – an organization keeps track of specified endpoints at every network and application architecture level. 

There are various API tests, including HTTP, SSL, and DNS tests. API tests, for example, frequently utilize HTTP tests to track application uptime and responsiveness. Meanwhile, SSL tests ensure that users may safely execute transactions on a site using genuine SSL certificates. In contrast, DNS testing ensures that the site’s DNS resolution and lookup speeds are within acceptable limits. A multistep API test is a sort of API monitoring. A corporation does many API tests to see if a specific workflow is working correctly from beginning to end.

Challenges of synthetic monitoring

Modern apps are, by their nature, complicated. Synthetic monitoring is sometimes insufficient to account for all potential faults or scenarios that may emerge since users access them from a range of locations and contexts. DevOps teams address this issue by prioritizing the introduction of application testing early in the software development life cycle. On the other hand, synthetic monitoring is often difficult to set up properly without specific technical knowledge, and it takes time even for team members who have the requisite skill set.

Synthetic tests aren’t exceptionally durable, and they can quickly fail when minor UI changes are made, resulting in unnecessary alert noise. If a bit of the application piece like a button is changed, must adjust the associated test. Finally, many synthetic monitoring solutions lack the context necessary to explain why a given failure occurred or the business ramifications, increasing resolution times and making it needlessly difficult to prioritize application performance issues.

Synthetic monitoring tools

A solid synthetic monitoring solution should provide total visibility into your applications 24 hours, seven days a week. It should comprise the following kind of synthetic monitors to do this:

• Monitors for single-URL browsers. A single-URL browser monitor mimics a user’s experience while using an up-to-date web browser to view your application. A browser monitor can inform you when your program becomes inaccessible or when baseline performance falls dramatically when run regularly from public and private locations. 
• Click pathways in the browser Browser click routes mimic a user’s visit, but they keep track of specific workflows in your app. You can utilize a sophisticated synthetic monitoring system to record the exact sequence of clicks and user behaviors you wish to track, then schedule the browser click path to run at regular intervals. 
• Monitors for HTTP traffic. Can use HTTP monitors to check if individual API endpoints are available and do simple HTTP checks to confirm single-resource availability. You should also be able to establish performance thresholds for HTTP monitors with HTTP monitoring tools. 

When user experience meets business impact, you have a winner.
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See if applications are working as customers expect, obtain AI-powered solutions to address issues before affecting end-users proactively, and improve business outcomes.

How Dynatrace can power your synthetic monitoring

You might be asking what synthetic monitoring technologies you’ll need to get started to understand better how your apps work. You’ll want to choose a solution that mimics business-critical journeys across your mobile and online channels using your most crucial applications. It can provide you with rapid answers to issues concerning the availability of an application and its impact on the user experience. Your synthetic monitoring solution should also help you rapidly discover the root cause of any application performance issue to address it as soon as possible.

It is critical to determine whether applications meet your SLA criteria and whether business outcomes have been affected. It can also leverage AI-driven automation to automate troubleshooting and rank problems in order of significance to the business, cutting down on time it takes for your IT team to find and fix core causes.

These comprehensive digital experience monitoring features enable you to discover and resolve application performance issues from any location proactively. Your company may go a long way toward assuring a consistent, pleasing client experience by implementing the correct synthetic monitoring solutions.

Enteros

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.