What is Synthetic Monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring simulates user interactions with your applications from external locations to detect issues before real users encounter them. Think of it as having a robot continuously testing your website or API.

How It Works

A synthetic monitoring service sends automated requests to your endpoints at regular intervals. These requests simulate what a real user would do:

1. Make an HTTP request to your endpoint
2. Wait for a response
3. Check if the response is valid (correct status code, expected content)
4. Measure how long it took
5. Alert you if something's wrong

These checks run continuously — every minute, every 5 minutes, or whatever interval you configure. When something fails, you get notified immediately.

Why It Matters

Your internal monitoring might say everything is fine. But what do your users actually experience?

• Find issues before users do — Catch problems in the first minute, not after customers complain
• Test from outside your network — Your server might be up but unreachable from the internet
• Track performance trends — Catch slowdowns before they become outages
• Validate third-party dependencies — Know when external APIs your app relies on go down

Synthetic vs. Real User Monitoring (RUM)

There are two main approaches to monitoring user experience:

For most teams, synthetic monitoring is a good starting point. It's simpler to set up and catches issues before they affect users.

Common Use Cases

• API health checks — Monitor your public and internal APIs
• Website uptime — Ensure your marketing site and app are accessible
• SSL certificate monitoring — Get alerts before certificates expire
• Third-party service monitoring — Track dependencies like payment providers

Getting Started

Setting up synthetic monitoring is straightforward:

1. Choose what to monitor (your key endpoints)
2. Set check frequency (1-5 minutes is typical)
3. Configure alerts (email, Slack, etc.)
4. That's it — you're monitoring