Datadog is pleased to announce the upcoming availability of Synthetics, a whole new layer of visibility on the Datadog platform. By monitoring your applications and API endpoints via simulated user requests, Synthetics helps you ensure uptime, identify regional issues, and track application performance. By unifying Synthetics with your metrics, traces, and logs, Datadog allows you to observe how all your systems are performing as experienced by your users.

When you spend a long time building an app or website just to have users complain about latency issues, it sucks. You don’t know where the problem lies, nor do you know the environment in which it occurred. So it gets ignored, and performance issues keep lingering. This not only wreaks havoc on the end users, but your bottom line suffers as well.

If you’re looking to learn the differences between Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring, keep reading. We’ve outlined 11 key differences, but maybe we should say 11 key ways the two complement each other.