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Advanced Website Monitoring Solutions
What Is Synthetic Transaction Monitoring?
Master synthetic transaction monitoring with our comprehensive guide. Enhance app performance, optimize user experience, and boost conversion rates.
Last Updated: October 23, 2024
What is Synthetic Transaction Monitoring?
Synthetic Transaction Monitoring is a technique used to simulate user interactions with a website or application to test its performance and functionality. By using automated scripts, Synthetic Transaction Monitoring creates “fake” transactions such as logging in, searching for a product, or completing a purchase without requiring real users. These transactions are executed regularly from different locations to ensure the application is performing smoothly and as expected, even during off-peak hours.
This method helps you monitor the critical paths of your website or application, like checking if the login system is working or if the checkout process is seamless. It’s a proactive way to catch potential problems before real users encounter them, allowing you to resolve issues quickly and maintain a great user experience.
One of the key benefits of Synthetic Transaction Monitoring is that it helps identify performance issues or errors before they affect your customers. For example, if an essential function like adding items to a shopping cart is broken, Synthetic Monitoring will catch it before your users do which saves you from lost revenue and poor customer experiences.
It also provides detailed data on response times, load times, and transaction success rates, helping you fine-tune your website or app for peak performance. And because tests run continuously, you can keep an eye on uptime, detect outages, and ensure your site is available and responsive 24/7. In short, Synthetic Transaction Monitoring is a smart way to ensure that all the moving parts of your digital experience work flawlessly, no matter when or where users interact with it.
The Importance of Synthetic Transaction Monitoring
Synthetic transaction monitoring is important for several reasons:
- Early detection of issues: Issues can be detected before they affect end customers. By executing synthetic transactions regularly, IT teams can detect and address issues like sluggish response times, failed transactions, and errors before they have an impact on actual users.
- Proactive approach to monitoring: Synthetic transaction monitoring takes a preventative approach by simulating user interactions and activities, enabling IT teams to find and fix problems before they become serious.
- Performance monitoring: Synthetic transaction monitoring provides insights into an application’s performance, including response times, availability, and throughput. IT departments can optimize programs to enhance the user experience by tracking performance indicators.
- Validation of changes: Application or system modifications can be verified via synthetic transaction monitoring. By executing simulated transactions before and after modifications, IT teams can ensure that the modified system or application operates as planned.
- Compliance: Compliance with industry norms and standards often requires synthetic transaction monitoring. For instance, financial organizations might use synthetic transactions to monitor the functionality and accessibility of their online banking systems.
Components of Synthetic Transaction Monitoring
The components of synthetic transaction monitoring typically include:
- Synthetic Transaction Engine: The foundation of synthetic monitoring is the synthetic transaction engine. It manages and performs synthetic transactions that imitate user interactions with the target application or system.
- Scripting Language: Synthetic transaction scripts are created using a scripting language, allowing developers and IT teams to create and modify scripts as needed.
- Test Execution Scheduler: Execution of synthetic transactions is controlled by the test execution scheduler. It allows IT teams to specify the scripts, length, and frequency of the transactions to be executed.
- Test Results Analyzer: Data from simulated transactions are gathered and examined by the test results analyzer. It provides information on response times, errors, and other performance indicators, allowing IT teams to identify problems and take remedial action.
- Alerting System: The alerting system notifies IT workers when problems are detected. It can be configured to set off alerts based on certain performance indicators or criteria and deliver notifications by email, SMS, or other communication channels.
- Integration with Other Tools: For a more complete picture of an application’s performance, synthetic transaction monitoring may be combined with other monitoring technologies, such as real-user monitoring and log analytics. Incident management and troubleshooting can be streamlined by integration with other solutions.
Components of Synthetic Transaction Monitoring
The components of synthetic transaction monitoring typically include:
- Synthetic Transaction Engine: The foundation of synthetic monitoring is the synthetic transaction engine. It manages and performs synthetic transactions that imitate user interactions with the target application or system.
- Scripting Language: Synthetic transaction scripts are created using a scripting language, allowing developers and IT teams to create and modify scripts as needed.
- Test Execution Scheduler: Execution of synthetic transactions is controlled by the test execution scheduler. It allows IT teams to specify the scripts, length, and frequency of the transactions to be executed.
- Test Results Analyzer: Data from simulated transactions are gathered and examined by the test results analyzer. It provides information on response times, errors, and other performance indicators, allowing IT teams to identify problems and take remedial action.
- Alerting System: The alerting system notifies IT workers when problems are detected. It can be configured to set off alerts based on certain performance indicators or criteria and deliver notifications by email, SMS, or other communication channels.
- Integration with Other Tools: For a more complete picture of an application’s performance, synthetic transaction monitoring may be combined with other monitoring technologies, such as real-user monitoring and log analytics. Incident management and troubleshooting can be streamlined by integration with other solutions.
By utilizing scripted transactions, synthetic transaction monitoring enables you to set up specific scenarios to find problems that would negatively impact end customers. Active performance monitoring techniques can detect and notify you of wide range of issues.
Test features: Maintaining a competitive edge requires innovation, but introducing new features or apps can be scary due to the risk of downtime or displeased consumers. Synthetic transaction monitoring can provide a safe environment for testing online, mobile, or cloud-based applications before the formal debut of a new product.
Explore new territory: Synthetic transaction monitoring allows you to assess the connection speeds when your application is introduced to a new region, enabling you to provide a faultless user experience right out of the gate.
Evaluate third-party performance: Today, websites include third-party services that simplify functions like shopping carts, social networking, ads, reviews, analytics, and SEO tools. Although third-party apps are useful additions, it can be hard to tell whether a problem is yours or theirs. Synthetic transaction monitoring can be used to test, monitor, and notify you of performance concerns due to these third-party services.
Compare against competition: Synthetic transaction monitoring allows you to create scenarios to examine your application’s performance over time and contrast that information with that of your competitors, enabling effective strategy development within a specific timeframe or geographic area given the strengths and limitations of your business.
Improve customer experience: When a digital asset malfunctions, your support staff must handle the calls, texts, and emails asking for help. The results are lost time and money, additional resources being used, and unhappy clients. Synthetic monitoring serves as your product’s “dress rehearsal”, identifying and resolving issues before they impact end users.
Ensure SLA compliance: Synthetic monitoring techniques can help ensure compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) by both service providers and consumers, maintaining agreed-upon performance expectations and standards.
Reduce MTTR: Synthetic monitoring software like Sematext Synthetics can help significantly minimize mean time to resolution (MTTR) by sending an alarm to the appropriate individuals before the problem impacts users. It allows for replication and understanding of issues, leading to faster resolution.
Although synthetic monitoring is frequently useful for problem assessment, it has limitations. External validation may be necessary to ascertain the root cause of a problem identified by synthetic testing. Is it the internet, your submission, the infrastructure, or something else?
Even if a warning gives direction, further study may be required to identify the core problem. To determine why an asset has become troublesome, test data may need to be compared to data from passive monitoring systems. A combination of monitoring tools, including synthetic and application performance monitoring (APM), provides a more comprehensive approach to identifying and resolving issues.
The ecosystem of apps, front ends, and infrastructure can be a big barrier to synthetic monitoring. Accurate results depend on replicating user interaction through scheduled transactions across a broad and constantly changing set of variables and input points.
Test Script Creation: Dotcom-Monitor provides tools to create and configure test scripts that mimic user actions, such as logging in, navigating through pages, searching, or completing transactions. Scripts can be customized to match specific use cases and user interactions relevant to your applications and services.
Monitoring Agent Locations: The Dotcom-Monitor platform offers a global network of monitoring agents that can execute test scripts from various geographic locations, simulating user interactions across different devices, browsers, and network conditions. This helps ensure consistent performance and user experience across different scenarios.
Performance Metrics: Dotcom-Monitor collects various performance metrics during the execution of test scripts, such as response times, page load times, error rates, and resource utilization. This data provides valuable insights into the performance of your digital services, helping you identify bottlenecks or areas for improvement.
Alerting and Reporting: The platform provides real-time alerts when performance issues or service outages are detected, enabling organizations to proactively address problems before they impact real users. It also offers comprehensive reporting features that allow you to analyze trends, identify recurring issues, and make data-driven decisions to improve performance.
Integration with Third-Party Tools: Dotcom-Monitor can be integrated with various third-party tools and platforms, such as incident management systems, analytics tools, and DevOps platforms. This allows for seamless collaboration across teams and the ability to centralize data and insights from multiple sources.
The Dotcom-Monitor platform offers a variety of synthetic monitoring options, regardless of the level of monitoring you want. Four distinct packages are available for the platform. Start with one and gradually add more as your company’s demands evolve.
- Web Services: Watch over online services and APIs like SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates, REST (Representational State Transfer), online Sockets, and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).
- Website: Set up web page tracking for various desktop and mobile browsers and devices.
- Web-based programs: for websites or applications that contain crucial multi-step transactions. Point-and-click programming is done using Every Step Web Recorder. Simple coding is sufficient.
- Internet Infrastructure: End-to-end monitoring from start to finish for email and web servers, as well as for protocols like FTP, VoIP, ICMP/Ping, and others.
Ready to transform your user experience? Optimize your application’s performance with Dotcom-Monitor’s comprehensive synthetic transaction monitoring. Start your free trial today and unlock the full potential of your digital services!
