Synthetic Monitoring
Synthetic monitoring is a proactive approach to monitoring web applications, APIs, and services by simulating user interactions or transactions from predefined locations and schedules. It uses automated scripts or bots to perform tests that mimic real user behavior, such as logging in, navigating pages, or making API calls, to measure performance, availability, and functionality. This helps identify issues before real users are affected, providing insights into uptime, response times, and error rates.
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. 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. By simulating traffic from multiple geographic locations, it helps assess global performance and identify regional bottlenecks.