Synthetic Monitoring: Types, Process, Tools, and Best Practices

You test your apps and websites end-to-end before release to ensure they don’t have any defects. But surveilling your apps in production is equally important. Synthetic monitoring helps you do that. It runs automated checks to assess key user journeys while your app is live.

So, if your checkout flow stops working all of a sudden, the scheduled checks can detect this problem and alert your team before more customers encounter it.

In this blog, we’ll learn in detail what synthetic monitoring is, how to perform it, what metrics to measure, the tools you can use, and some best practices for optimization.

Pair synthetic monitoring with comprehensive test automation using TestGrid. Request a free trial.

What Is Synthetic Monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring is an application performance monitoring technique that uses scripted simulations of user interactions to evaluate the app’s behavior under predefined conditions. It helps you measure service availability, responsiveness, and transaction reliability, and allows you to assess if your app meets expected performance standards.

App or browser synthetic monitoring generally runs continuously throughout development, pre-production, and production. You can run checks even during low-traffic periods or when no users are accessing your app.

It’s an active monitoring approach. You can also direct checks toward specific endpoints, workflows, or geographic locations based on your monitoring objectives.

Why Is Synthetic Monitoring Important?

Synthetic monitoring helps you detect performance issues before they disrupt user paths and create bad user experiences. Here’s what synthetic web transaction monitoring enables:

• Baselining using historical performance data and competitor benchmarking to identify regressions and opportunities for improvement
• Monitoring complex transactions like login, checkout, and payment flows and verifying that critical journeys work as expected
• Peak traffic and new market preparation by checking performance across different geographic locations before launches or demand surges
• Third-party vendor accountability via tracking service availability and performance against agreed commitments (SLAs)
• Capacity planning and root cause analysis by analyzing performance trends, failure details, and supporting telemetry
• Better user experience and lower bounce rates; synthetic user testing allows you to detect slow-running pages or broken links that affect your users

How Synthetic Monitoring Works

1. Define your monitoring scenario

The first step involves identifying the critical pages, API endpoints, and user journeys that need continuous monitoring. This can include login, checkout, and payment processing pages.

Then you define the success criteria (including expected HTTP status codes, correct response content, transaction completion, and acceptable response times) and thresholds, such as a maximum response time, to trigger alerts when performance falls outside your acceptable limits.

2. Select monitoring locations

Next, you have to configure environments where your test scripts will run. You can use public monitoring locations to assess externally accessible services and private monitoring locations to test your internal apps and restricted endpoints.

Make sure you cover relevant geographic regions, browsers, devices, and network conditions, so you can identify region-specific latency, browser compatibility issues, device-related failures, and network performance problems affecting different users.

3. Create the test scripts

This stage is about building your synthetic testing scripts. You can either create them manually or simulate user actions, like logging in, searching for a product, or completing checkout, record them, and convert them into reusable scripts.

Then configure how you want to execute the script, whether through browser tests, HTTP requests, API calls, or multi-step transactions.

At this point, you also need to prepare the required test data and dedicated credentials, and store passwords and API keys securely to ensure the scripts can run correctly without exposing sensitive information.

3. Execute checks through monitoring agents

After your scripts are built, you can configure a monitoring agent (also called a probe or robot client) to execute them.

This agent basically sends requests or performs browser actions, records the results, and reports them to the monitoring platform.

You can either deploy the agent inside the firewall to check your internal apps and private services, or outside the firewall to assess the availability and performance of public-facing apps from an external user’s point of view.

4. Evaluate the results against thresholds

After your scripts execute, the monitoring platform then compares measured response times, availability, error rates, and transaction completion against your predefined thresholds and success criteria.

In case a check fails, the platform can automatically rerun the test to confirm the failure and reduce false alarms caused by transient network issues.

5. Generate alerts and reports

Most synthetic transaction monitoring tools or platforms can send alerts to the responsible team through channels such as email or Slack when a synthetic check fails. You can also review dashboards and reports to review failures, response time trends, and affected locations.

Also Read: Performance Testing Guide: Types, Process, Tools and Best Practices

Synthetic Monitoring Types

The monitoring types can differ based on your objective, test execution method, app components, and network conditions. These are some of the most important types you should know about.

1. Availability monitoring

In this technique, you leverage synthetic probes to periodically check if your website, app, or endpoint is reachable and responding as expected. Availability monitoring can include HTTP checks for validating status codes and response content, DNS checks to verify domain resolution, and SSL/TLS checks to detect certificate validity or expiration issues.

2. Web performance monitoring

This synthetic performance monitoring mainly uses synthetic browser tests to measure your page load times and rendering behavior under controlled conditions. Single-URL browser monitors are one way to do this, where you focus on individual web pages and track metrics like Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Contentful Paint, and Speed Index to spot slow landing pages and performance degradation.

Also Read: What Is Web Services Testing?

3. Transaction monitoring

Synthetic transaction monitoring allows you to assess multiple steps in a critical user journey and ensure they work together seamlessly. Here you create browser click paths that simulate actions such as logging in, browsing a product, updating the cart, and proceeding to checkout. This method helps you evaluate individual steps and measure the overall transaction duration.

4. API monitoring

API monitoring is about sending requests to check service endpoints, HTTP status codes, response times, and response data. Single request API tests enable you to examine individual endpoints. Multistep API tests link dependent requests (e.g., verifying an authentication token before using it to retrieve order details) to verify that every request is returning the expected response.

5. Browser-based monitoring

Here you run automated tests in a browser environment to simulate user interactions and check how your web app behaves. Your checks can target individual URLs or follow scripted browser click paths to test page rendering, navigation, and critical interactions at scheduled intervals (e.g., every 15 minutes).

Metrics to Track in Synthetic Monitoring

These are some of the most critical metrics you can measure to check if your app can respond within acceptable limits, remain accessible, and complete critical essential user journeys correctly.

Synthetic monitoring metrics show you how your app performs. But your team needs benchmarks to determine whether the results are acceptable.

Teams can use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to define availability and performance targets and set thresholds for metrics like response time and transaction completion.

Read More: Software Testing Metrics: How to Track the Right Data Without Losing Focus

Best Synthetic Monitoring Tools

Here are some commercial synthetic monitoring solutions available on the market. The table below compares their best features, monitoring capabilities, and supported testing methods.

Also Read: Best 20 Performance Testing Tools in 2026

Synthetic Monitoring Best Practices

1. Integrate monitoring checks into CI/CD and GitOps

Incorporating synthetic web monitoring checks into your CI/CD pipelines will help you automatically assess your app’s workflows after deployments and catch regressions promptly.

You can manage monitoring scripts and configurations through version control and automated workflows with GitOps. This will improve consistency, give you an auditable change history, and make it easy for you to roll back faulty monitoring configurations.

2. Combine synthetic monitoring with RUM

Real User Monitoring (RUM), a passive monitoring technique, collects performance and interaction data from actual users so you can assess your app’s real-world user experience. Try to combine synthetic user monitoring with RUM. This will enable you to see both how apps perform during predefined tests and how they behave for actual users.

3. Secure synthetic test credentials and data

When you run your synthetic monitoring tests, you must keep dedicated test accounts with limited permissions and store credentials securely in a secrets manager. Don’t embed them in your scripts. And make sure your synthetic data for testing is isolated from the customer data. This can prevent accidental exposure, unauthorized access, or unintended transactions.

4. Check monitoring scripts after app changes

Your app updates can change UI selectors, page flows, API responses, or authentication behavior, and cause your existing tests to fail. Therefore, every time you make any significant code changes, run the affected scripts in a test environment and verify their assertions and dependencies to ensure they are functioning correctly.

Simplify Synthetic Monitoring with TestGrid

Built by TestGrid, TestGrid ONE is the AI operating system that runs quality engineering. Its synthetic monitoring offers a proactive solution to help you ensure your apps and websites always deliver optimal user experiences.

The platform allows you to build test scripts in code, plain English, or via record and play mode. It then executes your tests on different combinations of real browsers and devices, and across different locations worldwide.

You can monitor the critical user journeys in real time and detect and resolve issues before they impact users, with transactions monitored every 5 minutes across all platforms. And with an intuitive dashboard, you get actionable insights that enable fast decision-making and continuous improvement.

Beyond synthetic monitoring, TestGrid offers a complete testing suite, including support for regression, visual, functional, load, and performance testing.  For efficient end-to-end automation, this platform seamlessly integrates with tools like Jenkins, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, Travis CI, Slack, Teams, as well as automation frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, and Appium.

Transform how you monitor digital experiences with TestGrid. Request a free trial.

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