Synthetic Monitoring in Performance Testing

Synthetic monitoring is also known as proactive monitoring, which helps in identifying performance issues with application endpoints before they negatively affect user experience. Once the application has undergone an extensive performance test, the next step would be to monitor business workflows and analyze performance metrics. Waiting to get performance data generated by real users of the application, who may or may not exercise all workflows, would not be an ideal approach.

Most importantly, you cannot let the performance issue occur in real-time as the existing monitoring system observes the traffic and generates the alert for any discrepancy when it has already impacted the real users.

To overcome this problem, you need some clean, consistent, and recurring performance tests using scripted transactions simulating user behavior.

This is where synthetic monitoring comes in. It simulates the workflow or behavior a real user would perform more often and continuously monitors them to look for their functionality, availability, and response time at specified time intervals. Synthetic monitoring also fixes bottlenecks before they would actually occur in real-time.

Synthetic Monitoring Vs Real User Monitoring

Most often, synthetic and real user monitoring techniques look similar to each other. However, there are certain parameters that make them different.

Let's understand the difference between these two popular monitoring techniques.

Synthetic Monitoring	Real User Monitoring
Performance is measured using simulated users	Performance is measured using real users
Provides insights into the user experience of the application	Provides insights into application behavior under heavy user load
Monitoring can be done in both pre-production and production environments	Monitoring is performed in production environments only
Provides short term trends in absence of real traffic that help in baseline and benchmarking	Provide long term trends based on aggregated user experience that helps in planning future enhancements
Actionable alerts are generated when a checkpoint is unreachable that helps in the early fixing of the problem	Alert generation is dependent on real user action, which may or may not access the site or checkpoint, hence alerts will be generated accordingly

How Does Synthetic Monitoring Work?

Synthetic monitoring services actively test the application without real user load where traffic is generated manually using agents that simulates real users in a controlled environment considering different devices, geography, and networks and gathers performance data.

An extensible script is used to create activity (it can be anything like ping for availability check or any user transaction) to be monitored and the server continuously tries to connect whether the target site is reachable or not. This synthetic monitor further connects to websites, web applications and services, API, and network destinations to simulate a user's actions or path.

Below are workflows that clearly explain the actions involved in synthetic performance monitoring:

Benefits of Synthetic Monitoring

While synthetic monitoring tracks your application performance and availability, one can also leverage the below-mentioned benefits:

What Can You Monitor Using Synthetic Monitoring Tools?

Synthetic performance monitoring is supposed to check availability, web performance, and transaction monitoring. This can be easily achieved using a variety of tools that help to easily perform synthetic monitoring as per business needs.

Several APM tools like New Relic, AppDynamics, and Dynatrace provide in-built synthetic monitoring features that can be configured as per your testing requirements. Some of the commonly used monitors are mentioned below:

Key Takeaways

Following are some of the key aspects that you need to consider when working on synthetic performance monitoring:

• Create tests based on key business transactions
• Set performance issues alert thresholds based on baseline performance results gathered in the pre-production environment
• Consider testing and monitoring application reachability from less common geo-locations
• Analyze performance trends based on historical data and plan enhancements accordingly
• Competitive benchmarking by comparing your application services performance against competitors

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