When you’re spending close to $8 million for a 30-second Super Bowl ad, the one thing you don’t want to leave to chance is your website—especially when millions of viewers, whether they came for the game, Kendrick Lamar, or to catch a glimpse of Taylor Swift in the stands, might head there right after the spot airs. Make no mistake: web performance is just as critical as the ad itself.

Monitoring has been part of our lives for centuries. We watch ourselves, our environment, and our habits to gain insights and make better decisions. Even the much-dreaded annual health check we line up for each year is just another facet of this age-old process. The goal is simple: spot small red flags now, before they balloon into bigger health complications later. It’s the same principle that has guided us for generations—keeping tabs, so we can correct course before trouble takes hold.

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.

The evolution of internet-centric application delivery has worsened IT's visibility gaps into what impacts an end user's experience. This problem is exacerbated when these gaps lead to negative business consequences, such as loss of revenue or lower Net Promoter Scores (NPS). The need to address this worsening visibility gap problem is reinforced by Gartner’s recent publication of its first Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM).

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.