What is synthetic monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring runs scripted user journeys against a live system on a schedule to detect problems before users report them.
Unlike monitoring real user traffic, synthetic checks run the same journey every few minutes from known locations, so they detect outages and slowdowns even when traffic is low.
Teams often reuse end-to-end tests as synthetic monitors for their most critical journeys.
Example
A synthetic monitor signs in and loads the dashboard every five minutes. At 3am it fails because a certificate expired, and the on-call engineer is alerted before customers wake up.
Best practices
- Monitor the few journeys that matter most
- Run from regions your users are in
- Alert on failures and latency thresholds
- Use dedicated monitoring accounts
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