Synthetic Monitoring vs Infrastructure 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 meets developers should learn infrastructure monitoring to build resilient, scalable applications and participate in devops/sre practices. Here's our take.

Synthetic Monitoring

Nice Pick

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

Infrastructure Monitoring

Developers should learn infrastructure monitoring to build resilient, scalable applications and participate in DevOps/SRE practices

Pros

• It's essential for troubleshooting production issues, capacity planning, and ensuring high availability in microservices or cloud-native architectures
• Related to: observability, apm-application-performance-monitoring

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

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

The Bottom Line

Synthetic Monitoring wins

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