Synthetic Monitoring: What is it and how can it revolutionize your online business?

Have you ever experienced an interruption to your website that resulted in the loss of customers and, what's worse, in the erosion of user trust? If the answer is yes, it's time for you to learn about the power of synthetic monitoring.

What is synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring is the practice of simulating real user interactions with an app, ecommerce or transactional website. Then, the data generated from the simulated transactions is analyzed to evaluate how the system is behaving. For example, synthetic monitoring could be used to determine if a website achieves the desired page load, response times, and uptime.

After collecting and analyzing this valuable performance data, a synthetic monitoring solution can:

• Provide you with crucial information about the performance of your application
• Automatically monitor application uptime and tell you how your application responds to typical user behavior
• Focus on specific business transactions, for example, by alerting you to problems that users may experience when trying to complete a purchase or fill out a web form.

The synthetic monitoring of Atentus allows you to create no-code tests that proactively simulate user transactions in your applications and monitor key network endpoints at various layers of your systems. Quickly detect problems users face with browser and API tests, and initiate system-wide investigations so you can optimize performance and improve your end user experience.

Synthetic monitoring answers the following key questions

• Is my website active?
• How fast is my site right now?
• Are the transactions working?
• Are the components of the third part still working?
• How profitable is my performance?
• If there's a slowdown or a crash: Where is it?

Why use synthetic monitoring?

If your app doesn't work well when your customers try to use it, they'll quickly leave in search of a better customer experience. This could be developed in a variety of ways. For example:

• High bounce rates. Your website may take too long to load, resulting in a high bounce rate. Or, you may be falling behind your competitors when it comes to application performance without even knowing it. This will impair their ability to acquire new customers and increase their market share.
• Solution of difficult problems. Even when your organization is aware that something is wrong with an application, you may not know where to start solving the problem. When it comes to application performance, IT teams can't always get to the bottom of what's happening quickly, especially when they're overloaded and juggling multiple priorities.

Emulating user behavioral paths in a test environment helps you avoid these problems so you can:

• Monitor the health of the system. Synthetic monitoring can tell you if your website is available, how fast it's running, if key transactions are working as expected, and where a potential slowdown or crash could be.
• Improve performance. Over time, synthetic monitoring can provide you with performance benchmarks, highlighting areas for improvement and optimization.
• Prevent problems early. You can also use synthetic monitoring to find and fix potential errors before they affect your users, raising the level of user experience. This is particularly useful in continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) environments.

How does it work?

Synthetic monitoring works by issuing simulated and automated transactions from a robot client to your application to mimic what a typical user might do. Synthetic monitoring can be applied inside the firewall: inside the data center to ensure that all machines are working properly or outside the firewall to provide information on availability and performance from a global perspective.

These server calls and test scripts become “monitoring” tools when executed at set regular intervals, for example, every 15 minutes, and can be issued from a single designated synthetic monitoring client browser or from multiple browsers in different server locations to better measure site availability and responsiveness, globally.

This way, you get a stable and solid baseline on which to monitor server and application performance, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even during periods of low user engagement.

In addition, because it consists of test scripts, which simulate an end user's click flow through basic browsing, form submission, shopping cart transactions, or even online games, synthetic monitoring can be run in private test environments before implementing new features or during regular offline maintenance, revealing potential obstacles before real users have a chance to encounter them. The activity can simulate a browser or control a real browser.

Types of synthetic monitoring

There are a variety of use cases for synthetic monitoring. The most common include:

• Performance monitoring. Simulated transactions can be monitored to determine if a system meets performance requirements, such as completing a request within a certain period of time.
• Load test. By generating a large volume of simulated requests, synthetic monitoring allows engineers to evaluate how a system behaves under a heavy load. Load tests let them know if a website or application is likely to crash due to an increase in user demand.
• Transaction tracking. If developers or quality control engineers want to determine how a system handles a specific type of request, such as one involving a newly introduced feature that hasn't yet been implemented in production, they can initiate and evaluate transactions that simulate that request.
• Component monitoring. In distributed systems, such as microservice applications, synthetic monitoring can be useful for testing certain parts of the system, such as a particular microservice, by directing requests to it and measuring the response.
• Application Programming Interface (API) Monitoring). APIs handle data requests between different systems or system components and endpoints. Synthetic API tests allow engineers to evaluate whether APIs handle requests as needed. An example of where API monitoring can be useful is if developers want to determine if a third-party API with which they are integrating their application behaves as required.

The 7 Reasons Why You Need It

Find and fix problems before they affect your end users

Synthetic monitoring helps you emulate user interactions and run them as tests from global monitoring locations or behind your firewall. Synthetic monitoring proactively monitors your APIs, websites, web, mobile and SaaS applications, even during periods of low traffic, and alerts your operations team to availability issues or performance degradation.

Therefore, you get enough bandwidth to identify the problem, involve subject matter experts, find the root cause, and fix problems before they affect end users.

Baseline and Benchmarking

Synthetic monitoring gives you the ability to monitor your APIs and applications as often and as often as you choose, at all times. Over time, this monitoring data can be used to establish a baseline of your application's performance, identify areas for improvement, and develop performance improvement strategies. You can also use synthetic monitoring to compare the availability and performance of your applications with your historical self or with the competition.

Get ready for peak traffic season or a new market

Synthetic monitoring gives you a unique ability to monitor the area of your website or application that doesn't yet have real user traffic. Imagine a new marketing campaign that drives traffic to a new area of the application. Synthetic monitoring allows you to proactively simulate traffic to that area and helps you ensure availability and performance. The other use case is when you're launching your services in a new geography. Synthetic monitoring allows you to verify the performance of your applications from that geography and address performance issues, if any, before real end users encounter them.

Monitor complex transactions and business processes

Just verifying the availability and uptime of your APIs and applications isn't enough when you're striving to deliver high-quality application performance. Synthetic monitoring allows you to emulate business processes or user transactions, such as logging in, searching, filling out forms, adding items to the cart and paying, etc. from different geographies, and monitor their performance. You can then compare performance statistics across geographies and transaction steps and formulate your performance improvement plans.

Measure and adhere to SLAs

Service level agreements are critical to modern businesses. No matter what side of the SLA you're on, measuring and adhering to the agreed level of service is beneficial to both the customer and the provider. For vendors, synthetic monitoring helps to better understand the availability and performance limitations of the application. Armed with this data, providers can set realistic service-level objectives and avoid unforeseen penalties.

Hold your third-party vendors to account

Modern applications rely on multiple third-party components for functionality and data. The most common third-party integrations are CDN, payment processing solutions, search add-ons and site recommendations, business intelligence and analytics solutions, and more, responsible vendors.

Test from the perspective of end users

By monitoring your website or applications at the real browser level, where all the dynamic components of your applications come together, synthetic monitoring allows you to measure the true end user experience.

The monitors run from different geographical locations, different browsers running on real devices, and Internet service providers. This realistic monitoring provides information about response time components and end user experience metrics, such as page load, DOM load, first painting, and the top of the page. By testing your websites and applications from the perspective of end users, you can be prepared for all diverse user scenarios.

Synthetic monitoring metrics

Here are some common metrics used in synthetic monitoring:

1. Response time: This metric measures the time it takes for a system, application, or service to respond to a request. Response time is generally measured in milliseconds and can be monitored at the level of individual components or end-to-end.
2. Availability: Availability is a metric that indicates the percentage of time that a system or service is available and operational. It is expressed as a value between 0 and 100%. Synthetic monitoring can measure availability by sending periodic requests and verifying that the system is responding correctly.
3. Latency: Latency refers to the time it takes for a data packet to travel from the source to the destination. It is an important measure for evaluating the performance of networks and services that rely on fast data transmission. Latency is generally measured in milliseconds.
4. Error rate: This metric indicates the frequency of errors or failures in a system, application, or service over a given period. It can be expressed as a percentage or a ratio of errors per unit of time.
5. RTransaction performance: If a system or application performs transactions, such as payment processing or updating records, synthetic monitoring can measure the performance of these transactions. This involves evaluating the response time of individual transactions and the total number of completed transactions in a given period.
6. Database performance: If an application depends on a database, synthetic monitoring can measure the response time of database queries and evaluate the availability and overall performance of the database.

Synthetic monitoring vs real user monitoring

Both terms, Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring, refer to techniques used to track and analyze the user experience on a website or application. However, they differ in how and when information is collected and analyzed.

1. Synthetic Monitoring: This type of monitoring is done by creating simulated transactions or user paths through an application or website to monitor the performance and availability of that application. The tests are performed at regular intervals, often from different geographical locations and across a variety of devices and browsers. This type of monitoring is very useful to carry out performance tests, identify errors and fix problems before real users find them. However, it may not capture all possible real-user interactions or specific real-world problems.
2. Real User Monitoring (RUM)): This type of monitoring collects performance and experience data directly from end users during their normal interaction with an application or website. This data may include details about network latency, page load times, user interactions with different elements of the page, JavaScript errors, etc. Because RUM is based on real user behaviors, it provides a more accurate picture of their actual experience. However, problems may not be identified until they have already affected users.

Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages, in Atentus we use it together to provide a complete view of the user experience and performance of an application or website.

Start synthetic monitoring. Try Atentus

Atentus provides synthetic monitoring, a unique service that allows companies to have visibility from an external perspective on the performance of their digital, web and mobile app platforms. With robots installed in the main Internet providers, navigations are carried out simulating real users. These robots alert work teams in real time to real unavailability or errors, so that it is possible to take appropriate action to avoid dissatisfaction of real users. In addition, we merged it with services from Observability for greater visibility.

Atentus synthetic monitoring allows you to create no-code tests that proactively simulate user transactions in your applications and monitor key network endpoints at various layers of your systems. Quickly detect problems users face with browser and API tests, and initiate system-wide investigations so you can optimize performance and improve your end user experience.

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