Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

With application synthetic monitoring capabilities, DX Operational Observability (DX O2) can monitor websites and other services by probing the target from various globally distributed monitoring stations. These capabilities, which support SaaS and on-premises deployments, help teams shift from reactive to proactive management, elevate user experience for monitoring, and raise observability to a new level.

One of the most important features in a comprehensive enterprise-grade web monitoring solution is synthetic monitoring. Below, we answer some frequently asked questions, so that you can clearly understand what this is, how it works, and why it’s essential vs. optional.

Synthetic monitoring is a critical practice to proactively track the health and performance of web applications. By simulating user interactions, this approach helps developers identify issues before they impact real users. One of the simplest forms of synthetic monitoring is known as a ping check, which verifies whether an endpoint is reachable. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at what a ping check is, and then walk through how to perform one using Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring.

Most modern web applications are frequently updated to implement new features, execute marketing campaigns, or enhance their UX with new libraries or APIs. While this helps you better engage your users, constant UI updates make designing flexible, long-lasting tests challenging.

Imagine this: A customer tries to log in to your app, but the page takes too long to load. Frustrated, they leave. Meanwhile, your IT team has no clue there was an issue—until complaints start pouring in. Sound familiar? Performance lags are the new downtime. Lags are not just an inconvenience—they lead to lost revenue and frustrated users. To prevent this, organizations turn to application performance monitoring (APM) and synthetic monitoring to maintain peak application performance.