Internal Monitoring vs Synthetic Monitoring

Developers should implement internal monitoring to maintain system reliability, quickly diagnose production issues, and meet service-level objectives (SLOs) 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.

Internal Monitoring

Nice Pick

Developers should implement internal monitoring to maintain system reliability, quickly diagnose production issues, and meet service-level objectives (SLOs)

Pros

• It is essential for distributed systems, microservices architectures, and cloud-native applications where traditional external monitoring may miss internal failures or performance degradation
• Related to: metrics-collection, logging

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. Internal Monitoring is a concept while Synthetic Monitoring is a tool. We picked Internal Monitoring based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Internal Monitoring wins

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