What is Synthetic Monitoring?

Synthetics Monitoring simulates user interactions to monitor your applications, providing detailed insights into the availability and performance of critical business transactions and common user paths. By simulating real user behavior, synthetic monitoring helps ensure consistent uptime and optimal performance. This approach bridges the gap between centralized systems' accessibility and manageability, and the scalability and cost advantages of distributed systems, enabling IT teams to maintain smooth operations. Synthetics helps you proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact actual users.

Why OpsRamp Synthetic Monitoring?

OpsRamp’s synthetics monitoring enables comprehensive tracking of the performance and health of synthetic transactions, websites, and internet services. This advanced monitoring solution helps organizations detect, diagnose, and resolve issues proactively, ensuring optimal user experience and service reliability.

Key Features of Synthetic Monitoring

  • Synthetic Transaction Monitoring: OpsRamp allows you to simulate user interactions with applications and websites. By monitoring these synthetic transactions, you can identify performance bottlenecks and functional issues before they impact real users.
  • Improved monitoring: Synthetics performance monitoring uses metrics that provide graphical output for a selected synthetic monitor. Synthetic monitoring also provides the process of tracking the root cause for the unavailability of any synthetic monitor.
  • Accessibility: Monitor your services using the supported web browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. All users in your organization can configure, edit, and delete synthetic monitors.
  • Proactive Monitoring: Simulates user interactions to identify potential problems before they impact users.
  • Whitelisted IP addresses: A network firewall can block synthetic servers from accessing websites. You can whitelist IP addresses of public synthetic servers for the corresponding locations on your websites. Firewall restriction prevents access to public cloud servers. A Forbidden Access or Access Denied message displays in the alerts when access is attempted.
    See Synthetic server whitelist IP addresses for the current synthetics IP addresse list.

Types of Synthetic Monitoring

Following are the types of synthetic monitors supported by OpsRamp.

  • HTTP/HTTPS: Checks the availability and performance of web pages.
  • DNS: Validates the functionality and performance of DNS servers.
  • PING: Verifies the availability of network devices by sending ICMP echo requests.
  • SIP: Verifies the availability and performance of SIP-based communication systems.
  • TCP: Tests the connectivity and responsiveness of TCP-based services.
  • UDP: Test the connectivity and responsiveness of UDP-based services.
  • IMAP: Validates the functionality and responsiveness of IMAP mail servers.
  • POP3: Tests the availability and performance of POP3 mail servers.
  • SMTP: Verifies the functionality and responsiveness of SMTP servers.
  • RTT: Measure the time taken for data packets to travel from a source to a destination and back.
  • SSL: Ensures the validity and security of SSL certificates for websites.
  • FTP: Checks the availability and performance of FTP servers.
  • SCRIPT – HTTP Synthetic Transaction: This monitor allows you to create custom synthetic transactions using scripts.

Next Topics

This section includes the following topics:

Further Readings