What is Synthetic Website Monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring is a method in which scripted recordings are used for simulating the path that a user is expected to take while using an website. Such an approach allows the IT department to actively measure the performance and availability of the website and its various applications as well the IT infrastructure. Synthetic monitoring is also referred to as active website monitoring and proactive site monitoring. 

Synthetic Website Monitoring Benefits

• Synthetic monitoring makes it possible to test the reliability and performance of applications around the clock at the most suitable time. This website monitoring method can be used even for pages, web services and apps that are not currently accessed by the live customers.
• Using this approach allows the IT team to test the website’s ability to handle a future expected spike in website traffic. This can help the IT team to proactively resolve issues before potential users actually experience the problems. Hence it helps in protecting the brand’s reputation.
• Most of the websites nowadays depend on different types of third party applications to deliver full functionality to their users. This use of 3rd party application adds to the growing complexity associated with monitoring website performance. Synthetic monitoring helps the IT team to actively check the service levels and evaluate whether a third party application is negatively impacting the overall performance of the website. This helps to mitigate business risk by resolving the issues with the third party vendors, the intention being that this preparation will ensure a live customer does not experience these issues.
• A survey has shown that 90% of business organizations nowadays have got applications running in cloud or that they are planning to use the cloud actively within the next 3 years. Therefore if an organization is choosing to use a SaaS program for document storage, email, document sharing or perform any other important business tasks, then the synthetic monitoring method can help in evaluating the availability and performance of such web applications to handle peak traffic conditions.
• Synthetic monitoring can help an organization when it is looking to test and optimize new applications on their website before deployment to actual website users. Such an approach can help in predicting application health prior to launching it for the wider audience.
• Synthetic monitoring can help in Shift Left test approach that can bring down the costs and allow mitigating risks at an earlier stage with respect to new website apps. By enabling the IT team to test an app before launching it, the technique ensures smooth performance when the app finally goes live on the website.
• The IT team can easily direct synthetic scripts to various external services and applications to determine the nature of user experience that it is likely to produce. It could also be useful to evaluate how the product is going to fare against the competition.  

Synthetic Monitoring and its Limitations 

Synthetic website monitoring is a simulation of typical user behavior through the website.  Many times, it is not possible to anticipate how exactly the various users will actually interact with the website and they may use the website in unexpected ways. Since the scripts need to be created to do the synthetic test, it is not practical to create scripts for each and every permutation and combination. However, synthetic site monitoring is helpful in testing the common user behaviors and commonly used paths while navigating through the website.