In the early days of DoubleClick, back when SaaS was still known as Application Service Provider (ASP), I was tasked with setting up the QoS (Quality of Service) Team. Our primary mission was to establish a monitoring system, but we quickly found ourselves managing Service Level Agreements (SLAs)—a task that became critical after we paid out over $1 million in penalties for SLA violations to a single customer. The reason? Someone had signed a contract promising 100% uptime, an impossible commitment.

AI platforms have experienced several service interruptions over the past few months. We’ve all seen the memes fly when ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity go down. They’re funny at first, but then reality hits: if you rely on AI tools for work or business, these outages can grind your day to a halt.

When you’re spending close to $8 million for a 30-second Super Bowl ad, the one thing you don’t want to leave to chance is your website—especially when millions of viewers, whether they came for the game, Kendrick Lamar, or to catch a glimpse of Taylor Swift in the stands, might head there right after the spot airs. Make no mistake: web performance is just as critical as the ad itself.

Monitoring has been part of our lives for centuries. We watch ourselves, our environment, and our habits to gain insights and make better decisions. Even the much-dreaded annual health check we line up for each year is just another facet of this age-old process. The goal is simple: spot small red flags now, before they balloon into bigger health complications later. It’s the same principle that has guided us for generations—keeping tabs, so we can correct course before trouble takes hold.

Modern websites demand constant oversight to ensure every click, login, and checkout runs smoothly. That’s where synthetic monitoring shines: it acts like a tireless, virtual visitor that spots performance hiccups before they can bother real users. Our Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform features Playwright support. You can run new or existing Playwright scripts with little to no changes.

The evolution of internet-centric application delivery has worsened IT's visibility gaps into what impacts an end user's experience. This problem is exacerbated when these gaps lead to negative business consequences, such as loss of revenue or lower Net Promoter Scores (NPS). The need to address this worsening visibility gap problem is reinforced by Gartner’s recent publication of its first Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM).

Imagine this: You push a major update to your website, confident that everything looks great. Hours later, traffic plummets. Your users complain about slow load times, but when you check WebPageTest, everything seems fine. What’s missing? Real-time insights and proactive monitoring.

As someone who's been in the tech space for years, I've seen the evolution of user expectations and the way businesses have adapted to the digital world. What strikes me most today is how fast things have to move. I remember a time when uptime alone was the key to a successful service. Today, it’s no longer enough for a service to just be “up”—it needs to be fast, seamless, and reliable at all times.

Do you remember Back to the Future Day? The day in 2015 when the world celebrated Marty McFly’s trip to a futuristic 2015 in the iconic movie? We laughed at the idea of hoverboards and self-tying shoes while marveling at how much of what was once science fiction was becoming real. Here’s the thing, though: the future never announces its arrival with a neon sign or a ringing bell. It just happens.