Why to Use Synthetic User Monitoring?

Today, no matter what type of business you are doing, the website is crucial for success. In the dynamic and competitive business environment, you have to make sure that your desktop and mobile version of your site is continuously available, working correctly and responding quickly. 

Synthetic monitoring is a tool that helps you with the above goal. You may be wondering why you would use this monitoring method. To understand the need for this monitoring method, you need to understand the meaning of synthetic monitoring. Simply put, synthetic monitoring is a method where the users’ visits are simulated proactively, irrespective of whether or not the users are currently visiting your site. The monitoring process uses a robot client that mimics what a typical user might do after visiting your website. 

In earlier times, this testing process did not tell you much more than if your site is available or not. However, with its evolution over time, it can now tell us how fast the pages are loading, tests every object in a page, keeps an eye on every web host supporting the page and checks each level of internet infrastructure delivering the experience to end users. 

Real User Monitoring Vs Synthetic Monitoring

When it comes to ensure that your website is up, serving customers and meeting all the performance expectations, one of the most common solutions used is Real User Monitoring (RUM). This system monitors everything that users are doing and co-relate all their activities to present a comprehensive picture. One of the greatest advantages of RUM is that you will know exactly what the real users are doing. However, this is a limitation as well. As RUM tracks what real users are doing, you will not get to know a problem or issue until an actual user experiences a problem while using the features and applications on your website. You will not get to know about a website issue unless a user experiences that problem.  By the time, you experience a problem the user has already had a bad experience; this is problematic because you cannot solve a potential user issue in advance. This is where the benefits of synthetic user monitoring stand out. 

Synthetic monitoring process helps to detect any existing problem before the end users face it. Errors can be anything like loading time issues, unresponsive applications or others. This is the biggest reason why synthetic monitoring should be a part of your website monitoring package. With this process you can monitor any transactions even if multiple URLs or domains are involved. Further, with this method it will help to assess sections of the websites for uptime and performance even if the users have not visited that path before. 

Other Benefits of Implementing Synthetic Monitoring

• Synthetic monitoring is important as based on the results you can evaluate how your applications are going to work in different geographical locations. If there are bottlenecks, it could help you to detect the root causes. 
•  Another advantage with synthetic monitoring is that, the monitoring process is not limited to only customer facing or live websites. It can be implemented wherever your application is located. 

There are obviously good number of ways to monitor and manage end-user experience, but synthetic monitoring is a very good method of mimicking the experience of the end users. It helps to catch errors before your customers detect them. This definitely has a positive impact on your business which helps to preserve customers’ trust and establish your website as a reliable brand.

While synthetic monitoring confers many advantages, in order to get a complete picture of user experience, system and infrastructure using both synthetic and real time monitoring methods is advisable.