Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

Modern websites demand constant oversight to ensure every click, login, and checkout runs smoothly. That’s where synthetic monitoring shines: it acts like a tireless, virtual visitor that spots performance hiccups before they can bother real users. Our Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform features Playwright support. You can run new or existing Playwright scripts with little to no changes.

Picture this: You're the IT manager at a large company, and you're responsible for ensuring that your network is running smoothly. But how do you know if everything is working as it should be? You could wait for someone to report a problem, but that's reactive and not ideal. You could monitor your network constantly, but that's impractical and time-consuming. So what's the solution? Enter synthetic monitoring, the secret sauce to network monitoring.

Until recently, Checkly was telling you what broke in your app. Now, it can also tell you why it broke. We're excited to announce the general availability of Checkly Traces, a new addition to our synthetic monitoring platform that bridges the gap between frontend monitoring and backend observability. By combining synthetic monitoring with distributed tracing, Checkly Traces empowers development teams to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues faster than ever before.

Imagine this: You push a major update to your website, confident that everything looks great. Hours later, traffic plummets. Your users complain about slow load times, but when you check WebPageTest, everything seems fine. What’s missing? Real-time insights and proactive monitoring.