Synthetic Transaction Monitoring is a technique that uses automated scripts to simulate user activities on an application to test performance and functionality. By using automated scripts, it 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 various locations to ensure the application is performing smoothly and as expected, even during off-peak hours.
This method helps in monitoring the critical paths of applications, like logging in and the checkout process, to ensure they are working properly. Transaction Monitoring is a proactive technique to catch potential problems before real users encounter them, allowing you to resolve issues quickly and maintain a great user experience.
Synthetic transaction monitoring helps identify performance issues or errors before they affect your customers. Like for e-commerce businesses, adding items to the cart is broken; it will catch this issue before real users interrupt and save you from lost revenue and poor customer experience.
Synthetic Transaction Monitoring provides analytic details on response time, load time, and transaction success rates, which help in analyzing application performance. These tests run continuously; you can keep an eye on uptime, detect outages, and ensure the application is available and responds 24/7. In simple words synthetic Transaction Monitoring is a smart way to ensure that all applications perform smoothly across the globe.
The Importance of Synthetic Transaction Monitoring
Synthetic transaction monitoring is essential for businesses because it is a proactive technique that detects application performance, simulates real user actions, and prevents negative impact in real time. It runs an automated script and ensures 24/7 availability and performance baselines to identify trends. Synthetic transaction monitoring helps in testing new features before the release.
Benefits of synthetic transaction monitoring
Proactive nature
It identifies bugs, like a malfunction in the e-commerce checkout process, before it has a negative impact on customers and lost revenue. Synthetic Transaction Monitoring alerts teams and solves the issue.
Availability and performance tracking
The automated script runs continuously even during off-peak times to ensure the application is always available and responsive. Synthetic Transaction Monitoring provides consistent performance benchmarks and helps in tracking and identifying gradual performance degradations over time.
Pre-release testing
It helps in testing the performance and functionality of new features in the pre-production environment of an application.
etailed performance metrics
By running the transactions, it provides data on response times, load times, and success rates, which helps in identifying the peak time performance.
Geographical Insights
Synthetic tests from multiple regions help analyze the performance of applications in different geographic locations and various network and CDN issues.
Improved reliability
Synthetic transaction monitoring ensures all critical functionality is performed correctly, which increases overall reliability and stability.
Validation of changes
Synthetic transaction monitoring helps in modifications of an application by executing simulated transactions before and after changing; IT teams can ensure applications work correctly according to requirements.
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 are a synthetic transaction engine that executes the tests, a scripting language to define the tests, a scheduler to automate execution, a results analyzer to process data, and an alerting system to notify teams of issues.
Together, these components simulate user interactions, track performance, and ensure application availability and reliability.
Core components
The components of synthetic transaction monitoring typically include:
Synthetic Transaction Engine
The synthetic transaction engine is the core of synthetic transaction monitoring. It simulated transactions, mimicking user interactions like clicks and form submissions.
Scripting Language
Developers use scripting languages like JavaScript or Python to create Synthetic Transaction scripts, which define the user workflow transactions to monitor.
Test Execution Scheduler
The test execution scheduler controls synthetic transaction tests from various geographic locations. IT teams can specify the scripts, length, and frequency of the transactions for execution.
Test Results Analyzer
Processes the data collected from simulated transactions by the test results analyzer. It identifies information such as response time, error rates, and other performance indicators that help the IT team to take action.
Alerting System
The alert system notifies the IT team when bugs are detected. It can be configured to set off alerts based on certain performance or criteria. It notifies relevant teams via channels like email or SMS.
Integration with Other Tools
Synthetic transaction monitoring can be configured with other monitoring tools, such as real-user monitoring and log analytics, and give in-depth details of application performance.
Supporting components
Monitoring Requirements
The initial step is defining the critical user paths that need to be monitored.
Data Collection
The process of gathering specific performance metrics from each test execution, such as response times and success rates.
Learn More about Advanced Monitoring Strategies
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Synthetic Transaction Monitoring Use Cases
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 a 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 displeasing 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.
Take Control of Your Application’s Performance
Don’t wait for users to report downtime or broken transactions.
With Dotcom-Monitor’s Synthetic Monitoring, you can proactively detect issues, validate critical workflows, and ensure seamless performance across every region — before your customers are affected.
Challenges of Synthetic Transaction Monitoring
Synthetic Transaction Monitoring addresses challenges such as maintaining automatic scripts for complex logic, ensuring real-user behavior through accurate tests, analyzing the intricate ecosystem of applications and infrastructure, and accounting for network latency across geographic regions.
Key challenges
Application and script maintenance
With the passing of time, applications upgrade and evolve; the synthetic transaction scripts must be updated to reflect the new workflows, which can be a complex and continuous process.
Accuracy and realism
It is very difficult to create synthetic tests that accurately mimic diverse real-world user interactions across a complex, constantly changing ecosystem of applications.
Ecosystem complexity
The sheer number of variables in the technology stacks, like front-end applications, back-end infrastructure, and third-party integrations, makes this complexity in Monitoring is a major barrier.
Network latency
When the script runs, the results can vary depending on where the test runs from because internet speed and network quality differ across regions. A site might load very fast for users in the U.S. but much slower for users in Asia or Europe due to network latency.
Scripting complexity
Scripts need to handle complex, multi-step workflows, conditional logic, and various input data to be effective, which requires a flexible and capable scripting engine.
How Dotcom-Monitor Can Help You Monitor Synthetic Transactions
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.
Start Monitoring What Matters Most — Before Your Users Notice Issues
With Dotcom-Monitor’s Synthetic Transaction Monitoring, you can simulate real user journeys, detect performance bottlenecks, and ensure every step of your digital experience works flawlessly—across browsers, devices, and geographies.
Frequently Asked Questions
The frequency of synthetic tests depends on the business-critical nature of the application.
- High-priority services (e.g., checkout, login, payment APIs) are typically tested every 1–5 minutes.
- Less critical workflows might be tested every 15–30 minutes.