What is Synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring is an important part of modern IT infrastructure management that simulates user interactions with online applications, services, or networks in order to identify and address performance issues before they affect real users. Synthetic monitoring, unlike other monitoring approaches such as real-user monitoring (RUM) or application performance monitoring (APM), uses simulated transactions or interactions to replicate user behavior rather than actual user traffic.

What are the advantages of synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring provides multiple advantages for your organizations, some of them are listed below:

• Continuous Issue Detection – One of the key advantages of synthetic monitoring is its ability to proactively discover issues with performance. Synthetic monitoring, which simulates user interactions through programmed testing, may detect slowdowns, errors, and failures in real time. This proactive strategy enables IT staff to resolve issues before they affect users, reducing downtime and maintaining the organization’s reputation.
• Performance Optimization – Synthetic monitoring gives useful information on the performance of web applications and services in various settings and geographies. By monitoring parameters like response time, throughput, and error rates, IT teams may identify performance bottlenecks and improve the underlying infrastructure or codebase. This ongoing process of improvement in performance optimizes user experience and customer satisfaction.
• SLA Compliance – Synthetic monitoring is critical for companies that rely on service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure performance standards are met. By continually monitoring critical data and comparing them to predetermined thresholds, companies may proactively spot variances and take remedial action to satisfy SLA requirements. This proactive strategy not only helps to preserve customer confidence, but it also prevents potential financial penalties for SLA breaches.
  

  Did you know that you can access SLA Reports from the custom report section of Xitoring?

• Validation of software updates and deployments – Software upgrades and deployments are unavoidable these days. However, they introduce inherent risks to application performance and stability. Synthetic monitoring enables enterprises to test software upgrades and deployments in a controlled environment before they are released into production. Running testing on pre-production settings allows IT teams to discover and resolve any negative affects on performance or functionality before they reach end customers.
• Better Incident Response – In the case of an incident or outage, synthetic monitoring is critical for incident response and debugging. Synthetic monitoring assists IT teams in swiftly identifying the root cause of an issue and implementing necessary corrective steps by providing historical performance data and trend analysis. In addition, synthetic monitoring may be coupled with incident management systems to automate alerting and escalation, ensuring that significant issues are resolved on time.
  

  Did you know that Xitoring’s root cause detector use artificial intelligence to analyze various data collected from linux and windows servers in order to provide a faster solution to the discovered issues?

• Cost Savings – By proactively identifying and fixing performance issues, synthetic monitoring saves firms money on downtime, lost revenue, and damage to reputation. Furthermore, by improving resource consumption and infrastructure capacity, synthetic monitoring allows for more effective use of IT resources, which results in long-term cost savings.

What are the types of synthetic monitoring?

Let’s look at the many sorts of synthetic monitoring and what they’re useful for.

• API Monitoring: This type focuses on monitoring the performance and functionality of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) by sending synthetic requests and analyzing responses. API monitoring ensures that APIs meet predefined performance thresholds and maintain expected functionality.
• Uptime Monitoring: Uptime monitoring is the process of continually testing the availability and accessibility of online applications, websites, or network services. Synthetic transactions are executed on a regular basis to ensure that the service is available and responds in a timely manner. You may use uptime monitoring to guarantee that their online assets are highly available and reliable.
• Ping Monitoring: Ping monitoring, also known as ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) monitoring, is the process of sending ICMP echo requests (pings) to network devices or servers in order to determine their availability and response time. It assists in detecting network connectivity difficulties, server unavailability, and latency concerns.
• Web Application Monitoring: Web application monitoring involves simulating user interactions with web applications, including actions like page loads, form submissions, and navigation flows. It helps ensure optimal performance, availability, and functionality of web applications across different browsers and devices.
• Mobile Application Monitoring: Similar to web application monitoring, mobile application monitoring simulates user interactions with mobile apps on various devices and operating systems. It helps identify performance issues, crashes, and functional defects in mobile applications.
• SSL Monitoring: SSL Certificate Monitoring: SSL certificate monitoring checks the validity and expiration dates of SSL/TLS certificates used to protect online applications or websites. Synthetic transactions are used to regularly verify SSL certificate properties such as expiration date, issuer information, and certificate chain integrity. SSL certificate monitoring assists enterprises in preventing security vulnerabilities and ensuring continuous SSL/TLS encryption for their online services.
• Network Monitoring: Network monitoring involves simulating network traffic to monitor the performance and availability of network services, such as servers, routers, and switches. It helps detect network latency, packet loss, and other issues affecting network performance.
• DNS Monitoring: DNS (Domain Name System) monitoring involves simulating DNS queries to monitor DNS server performance and resolve issues related to domain resolution and DNS configuration.

These methods of synthetic monitoring can be combined and modified to meet an organization’s particular monitoring needs and objectives. By combining different monitoring types, businesses can get full visibility into the performance and availability of their digital assets, allowing them to fix issues before they affect end users.

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How can You get started with synthetic monitoring?

1. Go to your account at https://app.xitoring.com.
2. Go to the “New Monitoring” page and pick the sort of monitoring you want to have.
3. Provide the requested information in a few minutes.
4. When anything goes wrong, get alerted via one of over 15 notification channels!