Synthetic monitoring
Synthetic monitoring is the technique of using scripted transactions to simulate user behavior on a site to detect performance issues before they impact end-users.
Using Site24x7's synthetic monitoring tool, you can continuously test the availability, performance, and functionality for all critical components that help deliver your digital business to guarantee site reliability and a better end-user experience.
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Synthetic uptime monitoring
Reduce the risk of downtime going unnoticedMonitor site availability
Synthetic monitoring runs tests at periodic intervals as low as one minute from more than 120 global locations against your websites, APIs, and web applications to ensure a successful response. You can leverage historical data to identify monthly trends and seasonality.
Verify response
Use regular expression patterns or strings to check for the presence of a value in the returned response body. You can also verify web server configuration by adding response headers.
Go beyond website uptime
Monitor dependent resources like DNS servers, SSL certificates, mail servers, WebSocket endpoints, and more to get a complete view of all the resources powering your service
Synthetic performance monitoring
Benchmark and improve site speed and performanceWaterfall analysis
Understand the loading behavior of your page. Get a visual representation of all requests your page makes with timing breakdown and order.
Optimize every byte
Identify resources—CSS, web fonts, images, and JavaScript—that detrimentally affect loading and rendering performance.
PageSpeed Insights
Don't know where to start? From an efficient caching policy to deferring parser blocking resources, get all the recommendations you need to deliver better performance
Synthetic transaction monitoring
Detect and resolve issues for an optimal site experienceSimulate transactions
Use our browser extension to record critical business transactions, and check them from multiple locations by simulating traffic. Record typical user paths or actions like a form submission, add to shopping cart, or import Selenium IDE test scripts, and play them back at regular intervals on a real browser like Chrome or Firefox to ensure an error-free experience for your users.
API monitoring
Add JSONPath or XPath assertions to validate responses for APIs underpinning your mobile and web apps. Extract variables from a previous response, and create a chained API request to test real business workflows. Expand your coverage. Download our mobile network poller and test your mobile app APIs via networks provided by wireless carriers.
Proactively address issues
Quickly check whether the new functionalities of your web application and internal websites are working as expected by running tests from within your private network using our locally installable on-premise poller software.
Hear it from our customer
We're better able to monitor customer needs and respond quickly to maintain an exceptional level of customer service. With the help of this tool, we can focus less on the day-to-day tasks of keeping our cloud running, and more on continuous improvement, and rapidly delivering innovative, industry -specific solutions for our customers.
Site24x7 gives us a lot of flexibility in being able to add devices as and when they get added, and also taken away as well. One of the most attractive points of the product and which ruled out a lot of the competition was the ability to do web transactions.
Feature-rich synthetic monitoring tool
Customization
Select the appropriate check frequency, choose between different HTTP methods, set additional request headers, and more.
More than 120 locations
Choose your preferred monitoring locations from an ever-growing global network to conduct tests from where your customers are.
Zero false alerts
Burdened by incorrect alerts? Site24x7 conducts false positive rechecks from secondary locations when a resource returns an unsuccessful response.
Anomaly detection
Spot difficult to identify regressions. Our machine learning (ML)-powered anomaly detection engine automatically baselines metrics like response time to identify aberrations.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
Get detailed downtime analyses—Ping, DNS resolution, traceroute, and MTR reports—for every outage.
Alerts and Integrations
Get notifications via email, SMS, voice calls, or feed critical alarms to tools you already use like PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Opsgenie, and more.
SLA Report
Showcase your adherence to service-level agreement (SLA) commitments, and also hold third-party service providers accountable for uptime.
APIs
Integrate your existing internal tools with Site24x7 APIs to manage monitored resources and access data.
Hosted status page
Communicate about incidents affecting your service to reduce support costs and build trust with your customers.
Synthetic monitoring with Site24x7
Monitoring the end-user experience and ensuring the optimal performance of a webpage or web application throughout the world is crucial. The Site24x7 synthetic monitor helps you:
- Capture the availability and performance of web transactions using Firefox or Chrome web browsers.
- Record web interactions using a robust recorder tool and playback the results via a real browser to evaluate how an end user experiences them.
- Deliver a better end-user experience by eliminating possible issues in the transaction.
- View the latest operational status of your monitors in the Site24x7 web client.
- Track key metrics like transaction time or page load time captured from various locations interpreted graphically for easy analysis.
Synthetic monitoring overview
What is synthetic monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring, also known as active monitoring, is a technique used by IT admins and webmasters to monitor websites, APIs, web and mobile applications, and intranet sites without using real-user traffic. It could be a simple test to determine whether a port is up, or a complex test that simulates typical user actions on a site. Read the detailed introductory guide on synthetic monitoring to learn more about Site24x7's synthetic transaction monitoring tool.
How does synthetic monitoring work?
Synthetic monitoring simulates transactions between a client and a website to mimic typical user interaction. Paths are created to simulate an action that a user takes on a particular site. These paths are then monitored at regular intervals from various operating systems and multiple global locations to track functionality, availability, and response time. Synthetic monitoring can be done during peak and low-traffic hours.
What are the types of synthetic monitoring?
Depending on the resources you wish to monitor, a comprehensive monitoring tool can offer different synthetic tests for uptime, web performance, and transactions.
- Uptime Monitoring: Uptime monitoring checks the availability of a website. You can monitor websites (HTTP and HTTPS monitoring), REST APIs, DNS servers, ping, WebSockets, TCP/IP ports, email servers (SMTP, POP, and IMAP), NTP servers, and UDP ports.
- Web Performance Monitoring: Web performance monitoring analyzes the performance of a website and its various page elements to improve page load time, reduce downtime, and provide a better end-user experience. With performance monitoring, you can monitor FTP, webpage speed, and email server RTT.
- Transaction Monitoring: Transaction monitoring helps ensure that the application or website functions without any interruptions. Checking API responses, monitoring APIs in sequence, and analyzing web transactions are examples of transaction monitoring.
What is synthetic transaction monitoring?
Synthetic transaction monitoring is the method of actively monitoring complex business transactions by simulating real user paths and actions on a browser. It provides visibility into the availability and performance of websites and applications. It monitors multi-step user interactions on an e-commerce platform, from adding items to the cart until paying for them. With synthetic transaction monitoring, user interactions can be simulated from multiple locations, and alerts will be generated if there are any variations from the set thresholds.
How does synthetic transaction monitoring work?
Synthetic monitoring, also known as active monitoring, uses scripts to trigger actions that will be monitored. Here's a look into the process,
- The monitoring provider creates a scripted recording of web transactions with the monitoring tool to simulate the multiple steps that an actual user might take on the website.
- Next, the provider chooses how frequently the transaction should be monitored, the locations where the checks should be performed, and the wait time for each action. Once these are selected, the provider then configures the thresholds to be notified if they are breached.
- The monitoring provider then uses browser automation tools (typically Selenium) to test load time and key site functionalities at regular intervals. An alert will be sent if a threshold breach occurs.
Why do you need synthetic monitoring?
End-user satisfaction is crucial for your business as well as your brand value. A synthetic monitoring tool helps you:
- Ensure the availability of your website or web application.
- Fix issues before they affect your end users.
- Keep track of your page load time or response time.
- Check the performance of your page assets and third-party services.
- Set realistic SLAs for your services and hold your third-party providers accountable for any breaches.
- Track the performance of your website during low-traffic hours.
- Discover possible glitches during the preproduction stage.
- Gain a deeper understanding of the baseline performance of your website and compare against the competition.
Synthetic transaction monitoring vs. real user monitoring (RUM)
| Synthetic transaction monitoring | Real user monitoring (RUM) |
|---|---|
| Active | Passive |
| Simulates regularly traversed paths on a real browser and tracks metrics associated with these interactions | Captures real user information and page load time for real user interactions |
| Provides consistent, predictable availability, and performance data | Uses a JavaScript code snippet to capture metrics from resource and navigation timing APIs |
| Useful in a preproduction environment to identify possible issues in site functionality | Effective at identifying the real user experience that apps deliver |