Synthetic monitoring stimulates visitors going to your website. This process can give you valuable insights into your application’s paths, performance, and uptime. The right tool lets you look at how well your web or mobile applications perform.
It also lets you examine the application programming interfaces (APIs) that power them. By keeping an eye on your API, you can find potential performance issues caused by third parties. There are several reasons your company can benefit from synthetic monitoring.
Identify Issues Before They Impact Users
The right tools will help you imitate user interactions so you can test them remotely or behind a firewall. You’ll proactively look over your websites, and APIs, as well as mobile, SaaS, and web applications, even when there isn’t much traffic. By finding these issues now, they’re less likely to impact visitors and make them leave.
Synthetic monitoring lets you choose where and how often you check your applications. Over time, you can use the data to find areas to improve or baseline the application’s performance. You’ll be better equipped to develop strategies for improvement. You can benchmark your site’s performance and availability against competitors. Or you might choose to compare it against past versions.
Prepare for Peak Traffic
Even if you don’t have traffic to part of your site, Synthetic monitoring lets you keep an eye on it anyway. For example, if you’re setting up a new marketing campaign, you might have visitors going to a new area of the app. You can prepare by stimulating traffic there to make sure it will perform well.
If you’re changing the layout, it’s also a good idea to be able to test them before end-users come across them. For instance, consider flower companies. They’ll want to monitor their e-commerce sites throughout the year in multiple locations. But during peak times like Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day, monitoring solutions are put to the test.
If you have complicated transactions, simply checking the uptime and availability of the API isn’t enough. That’s especially true when you want to deliver high-quality performance. With synthetic monitoring, you can mimic business processes like filling out a form, searching, logging in, or adding things to a shopping cart. You can do this from different locations and compare the steps in the transactions to come up with a plan for improvements.
Measure Service Level Agreements
Service level agreements (SLAs) are a vital part of running a business today. SLAs outline the level of service your customers expect from you, defining the metrics that the service is measured by.
It’s in both your and your clients’ best interests to adhere to the agreed level of service. If you’re a vendor, synthetic monitoring can help you understand the performance limitations and availability of the app. With this information, you can create realistic SLAs to avoid unanticipated issues or penalties.
You might also work with third-party vendors, like payment processing tools, business analytics, or site search plugins. Synthetic monitoring lets you ensure that you’re getting the agreed-upon level of service to keep your vendors accountable.
