In this day and age of the technology revolution, most of us spend our time glued to electronic screens, whether for business or personal use. We constantly interact and communicate with applications, websites, and servers during this time and feel incredibly annoyed when faced with interruptions such as slow-running pages, incorrect page load size, network instability, or 404 errors. While this may seem like a minor problem, this cannot be further from the truth as they just might have lost a customer’s business and maybe even the customer themselves.
To tackle this problem efficiently and ensure that it doesn’t repeat itself, synthetic monitoring must be done timely. Using synthetic monitoring tools ensures that issues that affect user experience are detected beforehand and dealt with before the user finds out about them. If you want to learn more about synthetic monitoring and why it is beneficial, keep reading.
What is Synthetic Monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring or directed monitoring is a reliable way to check the performance of your software and applications by simulating user behavior. Through this method, you can send automated, synthetic transactions by a robot client that mimics real-user behavior and detect various issues like slowness or downtime before the real-time user notices a problem.
Synthetic monitoring can be applied inside or outside a firewall to ensure if the application is working efficiently and even provide necessary information about global work performance. These server calls and testing scripts typically run every 15 minutes or so, but they can be configured to any frequency you like.
Benefits Of Synthetic Monitoring
● Get updates about system health
Besides telling whether your website is up and running, how fast and efficiently it responds, and if critical transactions are taking place as they should, synthetic monitoring also helps with proactive monitoring. This is where network teams, with the help of synthetic monitoring, can identify and fix issues like slow down or failure before users can report a problem to the service provider.
● Baselining and benchmarking
You can monitor your applications and application programming interface (APIs) at any frequency or location you’d like. After an extended period, you get access to performance benchmarks where synthetic monitoring will identify and highlight areas of strategy improvement and optimization.
● End-user level satisfaction
Apps today are spread across the cloud and with more Saas applications like Zoom and Office 365, it becomes important to employ synthetic monitoring. This will help you track user satisfaction, even at a global level. You can measure accurate true end-user experience with insights into page loading speed, DOM load, and more.
Conclusion
These are only a handful of benefits that come with using synthetic monitoring. Besides this, you could also prepare for peak traffic season by simulating the traffic expected to find out issues beforehand, keep track of complex transactions and business processes like adding things to cart and checking out, and even help you adhere to service level agreements, which are crucial for everyday, modern business. So be sure to use synthetic monitoring to your advantage and ensure your website is performing efficiently.
