This is the first part of our 12-day Advent of Monitoring series. In this series, Checkly's engineers will share practical monitoring tips from their own experience. Hey there! Here is my take on what synthetic monitoring means and why it’s awesome! I think it’s a very complicated word for a very straightforward concept. In fact, I am convinced, that once you've used it, you will never want to live without it.
The cloud changed how businesses work, making things more flexible and adaptable. But keeping track of app performance from a user’s point of view in this new setup is tough. Legacy tools tend to not give developers an understanding of their users' perspective. That's where synthetic monitoring comes in. It's a strong way to focus on users and fix the problems that legacy tools miss.
A set of metrics known as Core Web Vitals have become key indicators of website performance and user satisfaction. Monitoring and optimizing these metrics for web pages can be challenging. Today, we learn how to use synthetic and real-user monitoring to measure, analyze, and improve Core Web Vitals. Delivering a smooth user experience plays a pivotal role in determining website application success.
Synthetic monitoring in Cloud Monitoring tests the availability, consistency, and performance of a web application from a real user’s perspective.
Businesses today are increasingly dependent on Single Page Applications (SPAs) for better user experiences. A Single Page App is when a user loads a web document and the application then updates different parts of the page with background requests. This is opposed to the more traditional Multi-page Applications (MPAs) where each click loads a different web document. Like the way you’re (hopefully) reading different pages on this web server.
As your applications grow, your teams may be faced with managing a complex, expanding mesh of potentially thousands of loosely connected APIs—each one a new point of failure that can be difficult to track and patch. API sprawl comes naturally in rapidly expanding, distributed applications, and the difficulty of maintaining centralized knowledge and toolsets for your APIs creates friction when teams need to leverage APIs they don’t own.
