Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

A customer pings support: “I tried to check out twice this morning and got a 500 each time, but it works fine for everyone else.” The session ID is in the email. You have full request/response capture in your environment, you have Datadog Synthetics already running browser checks against the same flow, and you still spend the next two hours grepping logs because none of those tools let you say “show me just this user’s requests, in order, and re-run them.”

In today’s digital landscape, maintaining a smooth user experience is essential. Websites and applications are expected to perform reliably and quickly, with minimal interruptions. One effective approach to enhancing user experience is synthetic monitoring, which uses simulated transactions to test performance. This article will delve into how synthetic monitoring improves user experience and highlight its benefits, along with code examples for implementation.

Modern applications are expected to be up 24/7, and that puts certain pressure on the performance testing team. One of their goals is to continuously monitor real users’ interactions with the site and develop a performance benchmark based on that information. However, there’s a catch: sometimes real user monitoring doesn't allow you to observe the system's behavior in extreme scenarios (such as sudden spike in traffic or abnormal user behaviors).

In the dynamic realm of synthetic monitoring, where ensuring the performance and availability of critical aspects of web applications is a must, an important aspect has been missing – support for monitoring sign-in processes that use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Until now, no synthetic monitoring product on the market has adequately addressed the challenge of monitoring transactions that require the input of MFA code.

Synthetic monitoring is a form of application monitoring that uses synthetic automated test scripts to simulate user behavior and interactions with applications and services. Synthetic monitoring involves creating scripts that simulate user actions such as page loads, form submissions, and button clicks. These scripts can then be run continuously or at scheduled intervals to monitor the performance and availability of applications and services.