Synthetic Monitoring Explained

Synthetic monitoring, also known as directed monitoring, is a strategic approach to evaluating your application’s performance by mimicking user interactions. This technique involves creating predefined pathways through an application to test and measure the availability and responsiveness of key business processes.

How does synthetic monitoring work?

The process of synthetic monitoring is fairly straightforward: 

• Automated bots are set up on browsers, devices, or computers to perform scripted interactions with your application.
• These bots mimic real user actions as they navigate through critical sections of the application.
• Bots execute a sequence of actions or “transactions” that replicate typical user journeys, such as logging in, making a purchase, or filling out a form.
• These tests usually run every 15 minutes, though the frequency can be adjusted or triggered by specific events.
• After completing the actions, the bots report the outcomes back to the synthetic monitoring system.
• If an error is identified, the system initiates a retest to confirm the issue.

Imagine an online retailer launching a new checkout process. To make sure it works smoothly across devices, they choose to use synthetic monitoring. So, bots simulate customer actions, such as adding items to a cart, applying a discount code, and completing the payment. This process runs every 15 minutes.

If an issue occurs—such as a failure to apply the discount or a delay during checkout—the monitoring system alerts the IT team immediately. This proactive approach prevents issues from reaching customers, keeping the checkout process fully functional, even during high traffic periods like sales events.

This way, any errors in the process are sniffed out before a real-time user finds them.

Pros and cons of synthetic monitoring

PROS

By simulating real user journeys within a controlled environment, synthetic monitoring offers a proactive approach to maintaining and enhancing system performance. This method provides invaluable insights into:

• Early detection of issues: Synthetic monitoring plays a crucial role in identifying errors before they impact the end-user experience, especially vital within environments focused on continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD).
• System availability and speed: It assesses whether your site is accessible, how swiftly it loads, and verifies that crucial transactions are executed correctly, pinpointing any potential bottlenecks or failures.
• Benchmarking performance: Over time, it establishes performance standards, identifying areas ripe for enhancement and streamlining.
• Enhancing system resilience: It aids in preparing your system for high-traffic periods and adjusting to the demands of new markets or regions.

Additionally, synthetic monitoring is essential to help companies adhere to service level agreements (SLAs) and ensures accountability from third-party providers, in the case of issues coming up.

CONS

• It might not work for everybody: Today’s applications are intricate, catering to users from diverse locations and under various conditions, which synthetic monitoring alone might not fully capture.  
• It’s not always easy to use: Setting up an effective synthetic monitoring system requires specific technical expertise, making it a daunting task for those without such skills. Even for knowledgeable team members, the process can be labor-intensive and time-consuming.
• It’s very sensitive to changes: Synthetic tests are known for their lack of adaptability to minor changes within the application’s interface. Simple updates, like altering a button, can cause tests to fail, leading to a flood of alerts.  
• It lacks contextual insight: A significant drawback of many synthetic monitoring tools is their inability to provide detailed explanations for failures or to assess the business impact of such issues. This deficiency can extend the time needed to resolve problems and complicate the prioritization of performance enhancements.

Because of the mix of positive and negative factors, it’s important to look for a balanced monitoring strategy that incorporates both synthetic and real-user monitoring to achieve a comprehensive view of application health and performance.

Why use synthetic monitoring?

Ensuring your application delivers a smooth user experience is crucial for your business — otherwise, dissatisfied customers may quickly turn to competitors.  

If your website or application is slow to respond, users are likely to leave, and you’ll see that reflected in increased bounce rates. This is key to your business because your platform might be underperforming compared to competitors without you even realizing it — something that should be easy to fix for long-term success.

Synthetic monitoring also allows you to streamline troubleshooting processes. IT teams, often stretched thin across multiple projects, may struggle to pinpoint the root cause of performance problems promptly. But by adopting synthetic monitoring, businesses can proactively simulate user interactions, identifying potential performance issues before they impact real users. 

This preemptive approach allows for the optimization of application performance, ensuring your digital services meet or exceed user expectations and remain competitive. 

Here are some key reasons why synthetic monitoring is so valuable:

• Proactive issue detection: Synthetic monitoring helps identify issues before they impact actual users, guaranteeing that performance and availability are maintained.
• Benchmarking performance: Regular monitoring allows you to compare current performance against established benchmarks, helping you spot inefficiencies over time.
• Continuous monitoring: You can monitor application performance 24/7, even during off-peak hours, making sure your system is always ready for users.
• SLA compliance: Synthetic monitoring helps businesses ensure that service level agreements (SLAs) are met, preventing costly breaches and penalties.
• Supports load testing and stress testing: Synthetic monitoring provides insights into how applications behave under stress, helping you prepare for spikes in traffic.

Synthetic monitoring is an extremely important facet in the DevOps toolset. It enables us to be proactive and find issues before they start to affect users, which is absolutely vital for new deployments and infrastructure changes. When we are able to simulate real user interactions, we can keep everything running smoothly and provide a great user experience much more consistently.

Types of synthetic monitoring

Synthetic monitoring encompasses a range of techniques designed to test and ensure the smooth operation of websites and applications by simulating user behavior. This approach is divided into three primary types: availability, web performance, and transaction monitoring, each serving a unique purpose.

Availability monitoring: This type focuses on ensuring that a website or application is accessible and responsive. It not only verifies the overall availability but can also drill down into more specific checks. For example, it might verify the presence of certain content on a page or the successful execution of particular API calls, ensuring every critical component is functioning correctly.

Web performance monitoring: This method zeroes in on how well a webpage performs, examining metrics like page loading times and the behavior of individual page elements. It scrutinizes the delivery of web content, identifies errors, and detects any delays in response times, providing a clear picture of user experience quality.

Transaction monitoring: Here, the goal is to mimic and complete actions a user might take, such as logging into an account, filling out forms, or making a purchase. This type of monitoring is crucial for ensuring complex processes work seamlessly from start to finish.

Beyond these, synthetic monitoring can be categorized based on the nature of the tests conducted:

Test Type	Description
Browser Tests	Automated clients (bots) simulate user activities like making a purchase to assess the end-to-end process.
API Tests	Focus on monitoring specific network and application infrastructure endpoints.
HTTP Tests	Assess the uptime and responsiveness of applications.
SSL Tests	Ensure secure completion of transactions by verifying the validity and trustworthiness of the site’s SSL certificates.
DNS Tests	Evaluate the site’s domain name system resolution and lookup speeds to ensure performance meets expectations.
Multistep API Tests	Simulate and monitor complex workflows, ensuring each step in the application infrastructure functions correctly.

API monitoring often involves multistep API tests, which simulate and monitor complex workflows to confirm every step functions correctly across the application infrastructure.

How to use synthetic monitoring

Using synthetic monitoring effectively requires planning and regular maintenance. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of it:

1. Identify critical user paths: Start by mapping out the key user actions on your website or app – like login, purchase, or form submission. These are the workflows you should prioritize in synthetic monitoring.
2. Set performance thresholds: Define acceptable performance standards for your critical paths, such as load times or transaction completion times. This helps you detect when something falls below expectations.
3. Schedule frequent tests: Regularly simulate user journeys at intervals that make sense for your business (such as every 5-15 minutes). This helps you catch issues quickly.
4. Combine internal and external monitoring: Use bots both inside your network and from external locations to get a full picture of your application’s performance, including how it functions for users in different regions.
5. Automate alerts: Set up notifications for any performance issues or failures detected by synthetic monitoring, so your team can respond quickly.
6. Refine your tests as your app evolves: As you release updates or add new features, adjust your synthetic monitoring tests to cover these new functionalities.

Synthetic monitoring or real user monitoring

Synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM) are two key strategies in application performance management, each serving distinct purposes.

Synthetic monitoring involves simulating user actions to test an application’s performance in a controlled environment. It’s particularly valuable for spotting immediate or short-term issues that could affect the user experience, even before the application is fully released. 

📍Synthetic monitoring shines in scenarios such as regression testing and ongoing surveillance of live sites, offering insights into how updates or changes might impact user interactions.

In contrast, Real User Monitoring (RUM) focuses on capturing and analyzing the interactions of actual users with a website or application. This is typically achieved by embedding JavaScript code into a webpage, which then silently gathers data on user experience in real time. 

Unlike its synthetic counterpart, RUM provides a window into the long-term performance trends and user behavior patterns post-deployment. This real-world feedback is invaluable for understanding how various factors, including different devices, browsers, and network conditions, affect the user experience over time.

In simple words, synthetic monitoring helps in pre-launch testing and immediate problem detection, RUM offers deep insights into user engagement and performance trends, making both approaches complementary tools in the arsenal of application performance management.

Conclusion

Understanding and implementing both synthetic and real user monitoring can significantly impact your ability to deliver high-quality digital services. By staying ahead of potential issues and continuously optimizing performance, businesses can not only meet but exceed user expectations.