End User Monitoring vs Synthetic Monitoring

Developers should learn and use End User Monitoring to ensure their applications deliver optimal performance and reliability to end users, which directly impacts business metrics like conversion rates and customer retention meets developers should use synthetic monitoring to ensure critical user journeys are functioning correctly and meeting performance benchmarks, especially for e-commerce sites, banking apps, or any service where downtime or slow performance directly impacts revenue or user trust. Here's our take.

End User Monitoring

Nice Pick

Developers should learn and use End User Monitoring to ensure their applications deliver optimal performance and reliability to end users, which directly impacts business metrics like conversion rates and customer retention

Pros

• It is particularly crucial for web and mobile applications where user experience is critical, as it helps identify performance bottlenecks, errors, and usability issues that synthetic monitoring or server-side metrics might miss
• Related to: application-performance-monitoring, synthetic-monitoring

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Synthetic Monitoring

Developers should use synthetic monitoring to ensure critical user journeys are functioning correctly and meeting performance benchmarks, especially for e-commerce sites, banking apps, or any service where downtime or slow performance directly impacts revenue or user trust

Pros

• It is essential for pre-production testing, compliance monitoring, and detecting issues in third-party integrations or dependencies that might not be caught by traditional monitoring
• Related to: application-performance-monitoring, real-user-monitoring

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. End User Monitoring is a concept while Synthetic Monitoring is a tool. We picked End User Monitoring based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

End User Monitoring wins

Based on overall popularity. End User Monitoring is more widely used, but Synthetic Monitoring excels in its own space.