Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you are running a website or have a live application, you will have to ensure that the digital experience for your end-user is seamless. That is where Synthetic Monitoring can help. Any bad experience, delay, or even a glitch could hurt your budget. Industry experts unanimously agree that it is best to ensure that the web pages load as quickly as possible.

Synthetic monitoring tools have long formed a core part of application performance management and monitoring toolsets. Yet no matter how familiar you are with synthetic monitoring, there is likely room to get more out of it than you currently are. Indeed, the default approach to synthetic monitoring tends to involve using it reactively: problems occur in production, and your team uses synthetic monitoring to help understand and remediate them.

There are many different classes of web performance tools, from synthetic monitoring to application performance monitoring (APM), to real user monitoring (RUM), and more. These different classes exist because each has its own strengths and weaknesses. When evaluating open-source or enterprise-grade synthetic monitoring tools, you want to look for capabilities that maximize its strengths.

It’s important for both technical and business teams to understand the different web performance monitoring options that are available as well as their various use cases and the benefits of each. In this article, we’ll compare synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM).