Synthetic transaction monitoring
Immediately detect
& resolve website
experience issues

Synthetic monitoring simulates user behavior and interactions on a website. It uses automation to perform actions, like clicking on links, filling out forms, and navigating through web pages, to test a website's availability, performance, and functionality.

Synthetic monitoring provides businesses with a way to proactively detect and address issues before they impact real users, measure website performance, and track key metrics such as total and individual step response times.

Synthetic monitoring works by simulating user interactions with a website or application. Businesses create scripts that define the actions to be performed and the parameters to be monitored. These scripts can be customized to simulate different user scenarios, such as logging in, making a purchase, or browsing through content.

Synthetic monitoring involves simulating user behavior on a website. It uses an automated tool to perform the same steps a user would take to complete an action, like logging in or filling out a web form, and records the results.

Real user monitoring, on the other hand, involves tracking the behavior and experiences of actual users as they interact with a website. This type of monitoring typically involves tracking user sessions and collecting data about page load times, response times, and other performance metrics.

Synthetic monitoring is useful for proactively identifying and diagnosing issues before they impact real users, while real-user monitoring provides aggregated insights into how users interact with a website in real time. To cover all possible scenarios, it is best to use both.

Synthetic monitoring is beneficial to any website or web application. Here are a few reasons:

• Fix performance issues before they affect your users: By simulating user behavior, businesses can identify and fix issues such as slow page load times, broken links, and other issues.
• Benchmark your website: Synthetic monitoring allows businesses to establish a baseline for website performance, monitor changes over time, and detect slow performance trends.
• Monitor third-party APIs and critical business processes: Synthetic monitoring allows businesses to ensure that third-party APIs, integrations business processes are performing like they should at all times.
• Ensure SLA compliance: By monitoring key performance metrics, businesses can identify and resolve issues before they affect service level agreement (SLA) compliance.
• Reduce MTTR: Synthetic monitoring allows businesses to reduce their mean time to resolution by identifying and diagnosing performance bottlenecks quickly.

Here are some of the best practices you should follow when creating transaction checks:

• Use unique selectors: Selectors use XPath and CSS to find elements on the page when testing. Make sure to use accurate, simple selectors that only point to the elements you want to interact with.
• Minimize unnecessary steps: Only test steps in your transaction checks that are actually important to the user's workflow.
• Optimize your monitoring: Use Uptime.com tools like the waterfall and browser console to gain more insights into your transaction check steps, requests, and responses.
• Wait on navigation: Many elements will not be available instantly when you navigate to a page. Be sure to wait on elements like those in a navigation bar to load before you trigger a click.
• Don't forget special cases: Include HTTP header data to specify a content type or authorization if the app you're monitoring requires it. If you want to simulate a mobile device, set the Is Mobile option in Authorization and Settings.
• Use alerting and notifications: Synthetic monitoring should be configured to alert IT teams when issues are detected. This allows businesses to respond quickly to issues and minimize downtime.

Synthetic monitoring can be used to test a wide range of website and application components and scenarios, including:

• Simulate user logins to ensure that the login process is working properly.
• Simulate form submissions to make sure users can submit data without encountering errors
• Simulate the checkout process to ensure that users can complete purchases without any issues.

For an effective website monitoring solution, you must have complete visibility into your applications around the clock. This involves using three types of synthetic monitors:

• HTTP monitors: This type of check will determine if a single resource is available, and they are useful for testing API endpoints.
• Single-URL browser monitors: This type of tool simulates a user visiting a single page on your website with an up-to-date browser. It confirms that the page is available, renders correctly in a browser, and doesn't have performance issues.
• Browser click paths: This type of check also simulates a real user but does so by following a workflow the user will take through your application. It will help confirm that users get a good experience when they log in, checkout, or follow another path through the application.
• DevOps integrations: A good tool with have built in integrations various third-party tools such as Slack, PagerDuty, and Zapier for easy communication and issue management.

Uptime.com is the ideal monitoring solution for businesses of any size. It offers an easy-to-use platform that doesn't require coding expertise and can accurately recreate real user experiences using browser-like capabilities. With its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, you can proactively identify and resolve website issues before they impact your end users. Plus, our 24x7 customer support team, consistently rated as the industry's best, is always available to help you resolve any incidents.

Become one of our happy customers and keep your visitors to your website happy with Uptime.com.