Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Synthetic monitoring is a vital practice to proactively track the health and performance of web applications. Instead of waiting for users to report problems, synthetic monitoring helps developers catch issues before they impact real users. One powerful type of synthetic monitoring is the browser check. These checks go beyond basic ping checks, simulating how a user would actually interact with your website’s interface.

Synthetic monitoring simulates user interactions with applications to proactively identify performance issues before they impact real users. Modern distributed systems require sophisticated monitoring capabilities to effectively test microservices, APIs, and complex user journeys across diverse environments. This article provides a framework to evaluate synthetic monitoring platforms in 2025.

Using server-side telemetry to understand what’s going on inside your system is incredibly valuable, but what about the responsiveness the user actually sees? In this post, I’ll cover what synthetic monitoring is and show an example of how you can create a simple monitor using OpenTelemetry, .NET, and an Azure function. If you only want to see how it’s built, skip ahead to building a synthetic monitor.

Synthetic data is gaining attention as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve. But what exactly is it, and why is it so important today? At a high level, synthetic data refers to data that's generated by algorithms or mathematical models. It is not data collected from the real world.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, customers expect seamless and reliable user experiences and have little tolerance for poor performance or downtime. In order to avoid the costs to revenue and reputation that can come from poor customer experiences, organizations across all industries are increasingly prioritizing digital experience monitoring (DEM), the practice of monitoring how end users interact with business-critical applications in order to understand and optimize user journeys.