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 monitoring - Site24x7

Synthetic uptime monitoring

Reduce the risk of downtime going unnoticed

Monitor site availability

Synthetic monitoring runs tests at periodic intervals as low as one minute from more than 110 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 performance

Waterfall 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 experience

Simulate 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

Feature-rich synthetic monitoring tool

Customization

Select the appropriate check frequency, choose between different HTTP methods, set additional request headers, and more.

More than 110 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

Get to know how your application is performing for your users and the issues users might encounter on your webpage or application with Site24x7 synthetic monitoring. Try simulating user actions from multiple global locations and receive alerts in case of any glitches.

Synthetic monitoring-FAQs

What is synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring or 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.

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?

  • The user 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 user chooses how frequently the transaction should be monitored, the locations from which the checks should be done, and the wait time for each action, then configures the thresholds in order 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 out if a threshold breach occurs.

Why do you need synthetic monitoring?

  • 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 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

Ensure the success of your online venture with our synthetic monitoring tool

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