Synthetic Monitoring Services | Detect IT Performance Issues

What is Synthetic Monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring software scripts interactions with a website or an application and then runs through those interactions at regular intervals to monitor availability and response times. The adoption of cloud native and microservices architectures has brought greater focus to end-user experiences delivered by web applications across different global locations. Synthetic monitoring can give ITOps teams a view into what the end user is experiencing around the world and how back-end changes impact the end user experience.

Benefits of Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic monitoring of websites and applications ensures optimal user experiences for websites, applications and business services. While these benefits are very similar to application performance monitoring, synthetic monitoring can help IT teams and developers uncover network and last-mile issues that affect the end user experience even when application performance metrics are strong. Key benefits include:

Proactively detect issues, restore services and minimize outages of business-critical applications and customer-facing websites.
Track performance metrics such as page load times and end-to-end latency that can affect business outcomes such as user signup rates and transaction completion rates.
Prevent or reduce shopping cart abandonment on retail websites.
Identify the cause of a site outage or performance degradation when the application itself is not the culprit.

OpsRamp Synthetic Monitoring

OpsRamp’s synthetic monitoring goes beyond simple uptime checks to modeling common user interactions and transaction flows to explicit business outcomes. While best-of-breed synthetic tools offer limited problem diagnostics, OpsRamp contextualizes impact across shared enterprise services, distributed infrastructure, and external third-party services. OpsRamp offers real-time health visibility by breaking down each transaction into individual steps and coordinating incident responses with relevant metrics, topology insights, and contextual notifications.

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Key Capabilities

Comprehensive platform:

IT operators can measure end-user experience and address performance issues with a broad category of synthetic transactional tests across widely used protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, FTP, IMAP/POP3/SMTP/RTT, PING, SIP, SSL, TCP, and UDP.

Multi-step transaction analysis:

OpsRamp’s script-based recordings track user experience across multi-step, multipage transactions by measuring response time for different transaction steps and sending alerts in the event of errors. Administrators can logically break down and rename different transaction steps so that they align more closely with the actions that users perform on their website.

Global locations:

OpsRamp can monitor user experience for business-critical services across 10 public locations, including Atlanta, Dallas, Frankfurt, Japan, London, Mumbai, New Jersey, Singapore, Tokyo, and Toronto. OpsRamp also offers synthetic checks for internal applications that are not available through public IP addresses.

Dashboards:

IT teams can tag a transaction-based synthetic monitor to a dashboard to access critical performance metrics such as uptime, downtime, response time, average latency, and alerts for their digital services.

Service Maps:

Service maps allow IT administrators to logically map a business service to its supporting applications and infrastructure for greater context.

Resources

Improve Website Performance and Availability with Synthetic Monitoring

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Learn how synthetic monitoring tracks the performance of websites and Internet services as an important part of the modern ITOM system.

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OpsRamp Conversations: Synthetic Monitoring

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Polly Traylor talks to Michael Fisher, Group Product Manager, OpsRamp on OpsRamp’s Summer 2020 Release and new synthetic monitoring capabilities.

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OpsRamp Platform Updates

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Learn how synthetic monitoring tracks the performance of websites and Internet services as an important part of the modern ITOM system.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How does synthetic monitoring complement application monitoring?

While application monitoring collects metrics on the application server, web server, database and other back-end application infrastructure that could indicate a performance issue, synthetic monitoring shows what the user is actually experiencing, including how fast a web page is loading, an application service is responding, or a transaction is completing. Synthetic monitoring can also provide visibility into the network infrastructure and connectivity that supports the end user’s experience. The combination of synthetic and application monitoring can help pinpoint the cause of a performance issue and how that impacts the end user experience.

Can synthetic monitoring be used for performance testing?

Yes. Synthetic monitoring can help organizations assess the quality of their digital services across different stages of the CI/CD pipeline including pre-production, staging, and deployment. It can then be used for ongoing monitoring once a website or application has been rolled out.