Synthetic Monitoring: What Is It?

Before you learn more about synthetic monitoring and its benefits, you need to understand the difference between frontend monitoring and backend monitoring, as synthetic monitoring supplies a frontend monitoring solution.

Backend Monitoring

Backend monitoring offers a glimpse into a client's infrastructure. It focuses on web server software, such as HTTP and SSL, databases, and application software, such as Java or PHP. Backend monitoring gauges the performance of third-party APIs, databased software, and other bits of code, ensuring data goes from the server to the user, and vice-versa, seamlessly .

Frontend Monitoring

Frontend monitoring gives you a complete view of your web application's performance from an end-user perspective, and includes third-party content. Therefore, frontend monitoring gives you more data about your website users' experiences. The experiences may differ, based on the network, location, browser, or device.

Enhancing the User Experience

While backend monitoring allows you to check third-party content glitches, such as OS and security issues, frontend monitoring allows you to test the responsiveness of a web design and check browser-related performance difficulties. Frontend solutions help you support the user's experience when he or she lands on your website.

Synthetic Monitoring

You can narrow down frontend monitoring further when you define synthetic monitoring. Synthetic monitoring tests and measures web applications by simulating website traffic using established test variables, such as browser, location, device, and network.

Synthetic vendors provide a remote or global infrastructure that visits websites from time to time and records the performance data of each run. The measured traffic does not represent actual users, but simulated users, designed and created, so software engineers and QA professionals can collect data on a web page's performance.

The Use of Behavioral Scripts

Synthetic monitoring uses behavioral scripts, or paths, to simulate a flow that an end user or customer might follow on a site. IT professionals continuously monitor the paths at specific intervals, for performance indicators, such as availability, response time, and overall functionality.

Therefore, you can use synthetic monitoring to enhance the user experience on your website, increase response rates, and generate more revenue.

Other Highlighted Features

You can also use synthetic monitoring to

·       Utilize production testing

·       Monitor business transactions

·       Provide a detailed performance breakdown

·       Conduct a root cause analysis

·       Review daily reports

·       Receive instant alerts

·       Benefit from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on-premise support

In basic terms, synthetic monitoring can do a lot for your business in enhancing website performance – for you and the user, and reducing downtimes and slow load times.

Catch Website Performance Problems Quickly and Efficiently

The poor performance of your website, slow load times, and any downtime can cost you money, cutting into your profits. Don't let this happen to you. By using synthetic monitoring, you can catch problems before users do, so you can mitigate issues in a timely and cost-efficient manner.

Keep Your Website Up and Running

By using synthetic monitoring software, you can maintain uptime 99.99% of the time. Users expect your website to be up and running 24/7. Therefore, synthetic monitoring allows you to meet their expectations by monitoring HTTP(S), SSL certificates, web services, servers, and DNS, alerting you and your team about glitches instantly.

Receive Immediate Alerts

Synthetic monitoring also prevents you from a revenue loss because of a broken website connection. Use synthetic monitoring to check website multi-step transactions for performance and uptime. The software alerts you the moment logins, forms, or a search fails.

You don't want to lose customers because of your website's speed. Again, by using synthetic monitoring, you can regularly check your website for performance issues, such as slow first/third-party page elements. The monitoring program also provides regular reports to prevent network failures and downtime.

How do your visitors experience your platform on their mobile devices? Synthetic monitoring allows you to check website performance on various mobile devices, as well as pixel ratios and screen sizes.  Make your website more available for users and keep them on your site.

What to Seek When Choosing a Synthetic Monitoring Solution

When you choose synthetic monitoring software, it should provide you with the following benefits:

·   The ability to utilize your development tests in production testing 

·   Access that includes remote and global monitoring checkpoints

·   Multi-browser monitoring, so you can view a page the same way your users do

·   The ability to export and share performance resorts via email, Excel, or PDF

·   Instant alerts

·   Uptime monitoring

·   Root cause analysis capabilities, including error screenshots

·   Website availability and load time reporting

·   Application programming interface (API) access for checking performance stats and your website's current status

You can use synthetic monitoring to benefit your customers and streamline your IT. To keep up with the need for responsive website designs and support the user experience, you cannot overlook the benefits of adding synthetic monitoring as part of your technological protocol.

Correct Performance Issues before Your Website Goes Live

By using the technology, you can correct any issues before your site goes live. Therefore, the software allows you to stay up-to-date and prepared. You can find and fix slowness, bugs, or mistakes pre-production to ensure a successful deployment. After your site goes live, you can use synthetic monitoring to benchmark your speed page against the competition or tune your page assets.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) vs. Synthetic Monitoring

RUM: A Passive Form of Monitoring

To glean further insight as to how synthetic monitoring works, you need to compare it, as well, to traditional real user monitoring (RUM). A passive form of monitoring, RUM represents a monitoring solution where you click on a link to a webpage containing RUM scripts.

The scripts track the performance of a RUM-enabled page during the user experience. IT professionals call RUM passive monitoring, as it requires the user to engage with a website for monitoring purposes.

Innovative and Proactive Monitoring

Synthetic monitoring represents a more innovative monitoring solution than RUM, as checks occur consistently around the clock. The automatic monitoring does not rely on users, and therefore IT engineers label it as proactive.

One Advantage of Using RUM

Getting closer to your users involves deploying RUM to capture latency issues that may be overlooked during synthetic monitoring. RUM captures user performance based on a user's actual location, device, or connection. To make synthetic monitoring equal to the challenge involves accessing a large network of computer checkpoints. That way you can choose test sites as close as possible to your users.

Synthetic Monitoring: Better Overall Monitoring Solution

While it does not offer the granularity of RUM, synthetic monitoring offers more dependability when it comes to checking uptime, receiving alerts, or following the data on third-party elements.

Although Rum can tell you when a page loads and its load speed, it cannot tell you if the page worked properly. Synthetic monitoring, or web application monitoring, works much like a bot, as it simulates user activities on a web page. If something unexpected occurs, you will know about it instantly.

One Final Thought

Stay one step ahead of your competitors and increase customer confidence. Synthetic monitoring can support your goals in driving traffic, increasing user interest, improving website performance, and getting rid of the issues (slow times or downtime) that cut into your bottom line.

If you are looking for an End-to-End synthetic monitoring platform check out Cloudbeat