Testing
Bad alerting is worse than no alerting. A monitoring setup that pages you at 3am for a 2-second blip that self-resolved trains your team to ignore alerts. And teams that ignore alerts miss the real outages. Getting synthetic monitoring alerting right is mostly about restraint: being precise about
Testing
Synthetic monitoring is one of those terms that sounds more complicated than it is. At its core, it means running scripted tests against your application on a schedule — simulating what a real user would do — and alerting you when something breaks. No real users required. If you've ever
Testing
Picking a synthetic monitoring tool is a decision most teams make once and live with for years. The difference between the right tool and the wrong one is often less about features and more about fit: what kind of engineers use it, what else it integrates with, and what it
Testing
Synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM) both answer the question "is my application working?" — but they answer it differently, from different angles, with different tradeoffs. Most teams need both. The question is understanding what each one tells you. What Each One Is Synthetic monitoring runs scripted tests
Testing
Playwright is one of the best tools for synthetic monitoring of web applications. It's fast, it supports all major browsers, it handles modern JavaScript applications well, and its API is intuitive enough that you can write a useful monitor in 20 minutes. This guide covers how to structure
Testing
API synthetic monitoring is the most cost-effective monitoring you can do. No browser, no JavaScript, no rendering — just send an HTTP request and validate the response. A well-configured API monitor can run every 30 seconds for minimal cost and catch outages within a minute. This guide covers the