Synthetic monitoring (also called active monitoring or proactive monitoring) uses scripted transactions to simulate how users interact with a service. Unlike real user monitoring (RUM), which passively observes actual user traffic, synthetic monitoring actively sends requests at regular intervals from external locations to check availability, performance, and correctness.
Common synthetic monitoring checks include HTTP/HTTPS requests to verify page availability and response time, API endpoint testing with expected response validation, multi-step transaction monitoring (login, search, checkout), SSL certificate expiration checks, and DNS resolution monitoring.
Synthetic monitoring is essential because it detects issues before real users are affected, works 24/7 regardless of traffic patterns, provides consistent baselines for performance tracking, and can test from multiple geographic regions. Hyperping performs synthetic monitoring from 15+ global locations with checks as frequent as every 30 seconds.
