Understanding Synthetic Monitoring

What Is Synthetic Testing?

Synthetic testing, also known as synthetic monitoring, is a proactive approach that simulates user interactions with your applications or website. It involves creating tests (no-code or scripted) that replicate real-world user behavior, allowing companies to monitor performance, availability, and functionality before users experience issues.

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Synthetic testing acts as a safety net—helping teams identify performance bottlenecks, test reliability, and detect errors in a controlled environment before they impact real users. By running these simulations at regular intervals or from multiple locations, synthetic testing ensures that critical functionalities work smoothly across different regions and scenarios.

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How Does Synthetic Testing Work?

Synthetic testing uses automated scripts that mimic user actions, such as logging in, searching for products, or completing a checkout process. These scripts run periodically to measure key metrics like response times, page load speeds, and error rates.

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For example, a synthetic test might simulate a user journey on an e-commerce website—from browsing products to making a purchase. The monitoring tool records how long each step takes, identifies slow points, and flags broken links or issues that could disrupt the user experience. This helps businesses gain valuable insights into system reliability and performance, making it easier to identify areas for improvement.

Key Benefits of Synthetic Testing

1. Proactive Issue Detection: Synthetic testing helps identify potential issues before real users experience them, acting as an early warning system for swift resolution.
2. Global Performance Insights: It allows you to test your application from various geographic locations, providing insights into how users in different parts of the world experience your platform.
3. Benchmarking and Performance Tracking: Synthetic testing enables businesses to benchmark performance over time, track trends, and measure the impact of updates on user experience.
4. Enhanced User Experience: By simulating user journeys and ensuring all steps work flawlessly, synthetic testing enhances the overall user experience, preventing issues like broken buttons and page timeouts.

Synthetic Testing vs. Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

It’s important to differentiate between synthetic testing, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and Application Performance Monitoring (APM). While synthetic testing proactively simulates user interactions, RUM and APM collect data from actual user sessions and system performance. Each approach has its strengths, but they serve different purposes:

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• Synthetic Testing is ideal for detecting issues before they affect users, ensuring uptime, and benchmarking performance. It’s useful for running tests during off-hours and ensuring new releases are error-free. Synthetic testing is also pragmatic and provides quick, actionable insights without overwhelming teams with excessive data.
• Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides real-time insights into how actual users interact with your application, including session durations and navigation paths. However, the volume of data generated by RUM can be overwhelming, making it difficult to extract actionable insights quickly.
• Application Performance Monitoring (APM) provides deep visibility into system performance, including server metrics, code-level diagnostics, and infrastructure health. Like RUM, APM can generate a significant amount of data, which may not always be immediately actionable and can be challenging to interpret without specialized knowledge.

Combining synthetic testing with RUM and APM provides a holistic understanding of both proactive performance and real-world user behavior. Synthetic testing stands out for its ability to offer immediate, actionable insights, whereas RUM and APM excel in providing a comprehensive view of user interactions and system health.

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Use Cases for Synthetic Monitoring

• Website Performance Monitoring: Ensures that websites are consistently available and performant, providing a positive user experience.
• API Testing: Verifies the performance and reliability of APIs, ensuring they respond correctly to requests.
• Third-Party Integration Checks: Verifies that third-party integrations continue to work as expected, even after updates or changes.
• DevOps Benefit: Synthetic tests can be reused across different stages of development. The same test scenarios can be used for both non-regression testing and ongoing monitoring, improving efficiency and consistency in the DevOps pipeline.

Best Practices for Synthetic Monitoring

1. Realistic User Scenarios: Ensure the scenarios you create reflect how real users would interact with your application.
2. Regularly Update Scripts: Applications change over time, and so should your synthetic scripts. Regularly review and update them to match new functionality and user paths. (Discover our AI Features to auto-update your scenarios)
3. Combine Synthetic and Real User Monitoring: Use synthetic tests for proactive monitoring and RUM for reactive insights to get a complete picture of your application’s performance.
4. Test Across Different Environments: Run synthetic tests across different browsers, devices, and network conditions to understand how your application performs in various scenarios.

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Synthetic testing is an essential component of a robust digital performance strategy. By proactively identifying issues, monitoring global performance, and ensuring a flawless user experience, synthetic testing helps software teams stay ahead of potential pitfalls.

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Synthetic testing provides invaluable insights into expected user experiences, empowering teams to deliver reliable applications with confidence.

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Is synthetic testing part of your monitoring strategy yet? If not, now might be the time to take a proactive approach to performance and start enhancing your user experience.
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Kapptivate offers you a 30-day free trial. Take this opportunity to discover how our Synthetic Testing solutions can simplify your processes and optimize your performance, with no commitment.