Use Synthetic Monitoring

You can use Synthetic Monitoring to monitor your application or API endpoint and detect potential availability and performance issues before the end user experiences it.

Synthetic Monitoring enables proactive monitoring that helps developers and operators prevent issues before users are impacted. It provides the ability to run scheduled monitors to ensure application availability. Using Synthetic Monitoring, you can create the following types of monitors, which can be run from various geographical locations called vantage points:

  • Browser
  • Scripted Browser
  • REST
  • Scripted REST
  • Network
  • DNS
  • SQL
  • FTP
The Browser and REST monitor types enable the monitoring of a specific URL. The Scripted Browser and Scripted REST monitor types enable you to upload a script, which is a recorded user path that is used to simulate user transactions on the application. The Network monitor type can be used to monitor the availability of any network server or host. The DNS monitor supports the following types:
  • DNS Server: Measures the resolution time and other metrics for a target domain.
  • DNS Trace: Validates the DNS requests are correctly delegated to the authoritative servers in child zone from parent zone.
  • DNSSEC: Validates the authenticity of DNS records according to Domain Name System Security Extensions.

The SQL monitor measures the performance of a SQL query allowing the user to spot any availability or load time issues. Monitor takes SQL query as input, and runs it against an Oracle database to generate various timing metrics.

The FTP monitor measures the performance of FTP operations allowing the user to spot any availability or latency issues. It takes target FTP server details as input and runs the requested operation to generate various timing metrics.

After creating a monitor, you can use Synthetic Monitoring to collect and view metrics, monitor each monitor run, and view an overview of your monitor runs in a dashboard.
Note

It's recommended to use non-privileged users of target/monitored applications when running synthetic tests.