Runtime Monitoring vs Synthetic Monitoring

Developers should learn runtime monitoring to ensure application reliability, performance, and security in live deployments, as it helps identify bottlenecks, failures, and anomalies that are hard to replicate in testing 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.

Runtime Monitoring

Nice Pick

Developers should learn runtime monitoring to ensure application reliability, performance, and security in live deployments, as it helps identify bottlenecks, failures, and anomalies that are hard to replicate in testing

Pros

• It is essential for modern DevOps and cloud-native applications, where continuous monitoring supports incident response, capacity planning, and user experience improvements
• Related to: observability, 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. Runtime Monitoring is a concept while Synthetic Monitoring is a tool. We picked Runtime Monitoring based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Runtime Monitoring wins

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