Must-Have Synthetic Monitoring Tool Features

The Complete List of Must-Have Synthetic Monitoring Features

Synthetic monitoring simulates user engagement on a website or application to verify its reachability, availability, reliability, and performance at all times, day or night. The term is also synonymous with “web monitoring” and “digital monitoring”, which, in turn, is a more modern term associated with digital transformation initiatives. 

The greatest value of synthetic monitoring lies in its ability to help organizations discover problems long before end users experience them. The field has evolved significantly over the last few years, and newcomers have also entered the market with basic offerings. So, how do you choose the best tool? In this guide, we have rounded up the most important features that a synthetic monitoring tool should possess to help you answer the question. 

The features are grouped into four categories: synthetic monitoring types, analytics capabilities, global reachability, and administration of your chosen synthetic monitoring tool. You can use this guide while navigating the different stages of your purchasing journey or when drafting a Request for Proposal (RFP) to solicit information from a vendor or service provider.

Synthetic monitoring types

You can use synthetic monitoring to analyze multiple aspects of your web environment, including the paths that your end users take to reach your applications. When monitoring a web application, it is important to break down the overall application response time into dozens of incremental steps. This helps with discovering the reasons behind any performance issues. It is also important to account for the different available browser versions and how they render your application’s user interface. We recommend simulating a full business transaction with synthetic monitoring to gauge the complete user experience, rather than stopping at the first page loaded.

Use the following table to gain familiarity with all the types of monitoring options you should expect from an advanced synthetic monitoring tool.

• User Journey Transaction Testing: User journey transaction testing involves recording or scripting sequential steps to capture a complete web-based business transaction simulating real users, including login and SSO.
• HTTP Monitoring: HTTP monitoring entails testing the base page only for availability using an HTTP GET request or emulating the page with and without executing JavaScript.
• Real Browser Testing: To truly emulate the end-user experience, web tests must be performed across various browser types and versions.
• Mobile Simulation: This lets you simulate mobile users by platform (Android, iOS), browser (Safari, Chrome), or wireless speed (3G, 4G).
• SaaS Monitoring: Synthetic tests of mainstream SaaS applications. The monitoring solution should provide out-of-the-box templates or custom scripts for monitoring different workflows.
• API Monitor: Monitoring an Application Programming Interface (API) is a key requirement for both a single URI and a full multi-step transaction, and it should support both local and global variables.
• Ping Test: A ping is used to test the basic reachability of a website or IP address. Your monitoring solution should support ICMP Ping, UDP Ping, and TCP Ping.
• TraceRoute Test: A traceroute tool shows you each hop sequentially and the total number of hops. Segmented hop-by-hop network latency measurements should be supported via UDP, TCP, and ICMP TraceRoute.
• SMTP Test: To know if your email server is functioning correctly, you need support for testing of SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols.
• DNS Monitoring: DNS testing needs to provide performance and error data for every step in the DNS resolution process, including IP address, SOA, MX, SRV, NS, and root servers. DNS monitoring should also involve tracking all individual servers involved in DNS resolution to help mitigate a DNS attack or outage.
• CDN Monitoring: Monitoring from as many geographic locations as possible is key to maintaining CDN performance. CDN monitoring will provide insight into server mapping and help identify whether incidents are isolated/regional or system-wide.
• FTP Monitoring: FTP monitoring involves testing file transfer services and data delivery via the FTP protocol over TCP/IP networks. Testing an FTP server must include user logins and FTP requests to simulate real users accessing your web applications.
• WebSocket Test: A WebSocket test checks the availability of your WebSocket service (typically used in chats, financial tickers, and gaming applications). WebSocket monitoring also allows sending a string message and verifying the return data.
• Test NTP Server: This type of test should verify that the NTP server and time services are available, that the public UDP port is reachable, and that the time offset is accurate.
• SSL Test: SSL testing involves checking SSL certificate validity, protocol support, key exchange, and cipher strength.
• MQTT Test: This type of testing allows you to monitor the performance and availability of IoT devices. MQTT testing requires publishing messages to the MQTT broker, listening for MQTT messages, and simulating connection issues.

Synthetic monitoring analytics

Once you have achieved full coverage of all the facets of your application environment with synthetic monitoring, it is time to analyze the collected data. To conduct effective analysis, it is important to be able to visualize data trends on a dashboard, set up alerts for latency and outage anomalies, and isolate any performance issues in the data path between your application and its end users. 

More advanced visualization options include charts such as histograms or scatterplots, access to a screenshot, or even a filmstrip of the user interacting with the page. The sophistication of your tool’s analytics will allow you to shorten the mean time to detect an application performance problem before your customers have the chance to complain.

• Trends Data: Performance monitoring vendors should offer the ability to compare data across time periods so you can easily visualize day-over-day or year-over-year changes and identify trends.
• Waterfall of Granular KPIs: Waterfall data should capture standard HTTP metrics for all requests on a page, and include page-level metrics such as Render Start, DomComplete, and OnLoad.
• Data Aggregation: Data aggregation allows you to roll up raw data into minimum, maximum, average, median, and 95th-percentile groupings so you can pinpoint variations over time.
• Data Aggregation by Meta-Data: This feature allows users to group data by specific dimensions, such as node, ISP, user-defined tags, city, hour of day, error code, and so on.
• Benchmark Comparison: This functionality allows users to compare performance across multiple websites to analyze how they stack up against competitors and industry benchmark standards.
• Grouping by JavaScript: Grouping by JavaScript lets you measure latency by first-party (your code), third-party (e.g., your site’s ad service), or designate it with a tag.
• Scatterplot: A scatter plot shows each sample measurement as a single point on a graph, based on its value and collection time, helping identify outliers at a glance, especially when the points are color-coded.
• Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF): CDF helps determine the probability of a poor end-user experience by latency (e.g., 33% of users experience latency of 10 seconds or more) and answers the question, “Where does my performance long-tail start and end?”
• Histogram: A histogram, or frequency distribution, shows how often an end user may experience long latency (e.g., 20% between 1 and 2 minutes), and consequently a slow page load.
• Advanced Visualization: Data visualization features such as Bubble Chart, Grid Chart, and Heat Maps allow you to better analyze and correlate data.
• Dashboards: Any analytics dashboard should be customizable, support AI-based smart boards, provide heatmaps, and be shareable via public links so that any relevant employee can access it.
• Reports: A dashboard helps you in real-time, while reports combine more than one test, helping you automate executive updates, perform trend analysis, or manage your SLAs.
• Alerting: Monitoring your website and application must include a comprehensive alerting system. Alerts allow you to monitor all alert events triggered in the system. Alerting on raw or aggregated data should be configurable by thresholds, transaction steps, percentages of failed checks, trend changes, and/or transient incidents.
• False Positive Reduction: False positive reduction entails suppressing false alerts by generating alerts only after a specified percentage of concurrent or sequential checks fail.
• Fault Isolation: This feature allows you to isolate issues down to all elements of the service delivery chain, including the wireless provider, ISP, last-mile provider, CDN provider, and DNS provider.
• Cached Versus Uncached: This feature lets you measure the delay experienced by end users when the elements being loaded have not been cached (e.g., by a CDN).
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management: This critical feature analyzes your monthly service uptime and latency to determine whether your SLA was met outside any pre-agreed maintenance windows, so you can hold your service providers to account.

Synthetic monitoring reachability

Guaranteeing the reachability of your digital services is one of the most important strategic aspects of synthetic monitoring. Your service may be perfectly reachable from AWS within the West Coast of the U.S., for instance, but not from a wireless network in Eastern Europe. 

The only way to ensure your service can be reached by your entire market is to choose a vendor that has heavily invested in deploying hundreds of nodes around the world as strategic vantage points. Nodes may be located in data centers owned by local Internet Service Providers (ISPs), within the wireless coverage of major mobile service providers, on the Internet backbone, or even in the Local Area Network (LAN) where your application is deployed. Your ability to isolate a performance fault depends on the number and locations of nodes you measure.

• Public Cloud Nodes: Cloud is central to the application delivery chain, and huge amounts of traffic flow to, from, and between cloud service providers. All synthetic monitoring providers deploy vantage points, or nodes, on public cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud). Some recent providers do so, however, mostly because it makes it easy for them to claim quick global coverage without investing in more node types.
• Internet Backbone Nodes: Backbone nodes allow you to monitor directly from ISPs, which carry the majority of the Internet’s global traffic, letting you measure performance excluding external network noise. They are critical in helping determine whether performance incidents stem from a problem with the edge or core of the Internet.
• Last Mile Nodes: To isolate reachability problems, nodes are required in every segment of the service delivery chain, including the “last mile” access network. Synthetic monitoring from the on and off-ramp of local ISPs to the backbone is essential for troubleshooting and localizing specific Internet problems.
• Wireless Nodes: To isolate mobile access issues, your provider must have nodes co-located with all the major wireless providers in your end user’s regions.
• International Nodes: For users in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, and South America, ensure your provider has a robust set of international nodes with ISPs local to your market and customer base.
• On-Premise Nodes: On-premise nodes allow you to use your own hardware and the provider’s software to implement your own node/s to monitor user experience behind the firewall and identify local issues specific to critical business applications.
• Detailed Network Monitoring: Troubleshooting performance outages and slowdowns always requires a breakdown of network latency, hop-by-hop, and by Autonomous System Number (ASN). Synthetic monitoring providers should offer detailed network monitoring capabilities.
• Bandwidth Throttling: Bandwidth throttling simulates mobile access point conditions over a slow wireless network or in areas with a weak wireless signal.

Synthetic monitoring platform

There are a number of attributes associated with your synthetic monitoring tooling that can’t be technically categorized as monitoring types or analytic features, nor do they pertain to reachability scope, even though they are equally important to the success of your monitoring strategy. The ability, for instance, to manually and instantaneously trigger a test of your CDN by pushing a button may prove extremely handy during an outage, when troubleshooting to isolate the issue to a specific data path. 

Another useful feature is support for conducting simultaneous tests from multiple vantage points, so you can alert your operations team only if 75% of concurrent tests fail, helping you avoid false alerts due to transient network issues. Below is a list of additional features that are valuable to a synthetic monitoring platform.

• Test Frequency: The frequency of checks should be configurable, ranging from seconds, minutes, and hours to allow for maximum flexibility.
• Data Retention: Storing raw data for a set retention period (e.g., a specific number of months or years) helps you compare data and identify trends over time.
• Concurrent Monitoring: Your site needs to be monitored simultaneously by a customizable number of nodes to account for interference from short, transient network delays and prevent false positives and unnecessary noise.
• On-Demand Synthetic Test: The ability to run a synthetic test on demand (either via the UI or API) will help you identify critical problems during troubleshooting to improve web and application performance.
• Geographic Selection: This feature allows users to select testing checkpoints by geography.
• Screenshots and Filmstrips: Having the end user’s interaction with the webpage visually recorded throughout the transaction journey complements recorded data with additional context.
• Custom Scripts: In addition to monitoring standard web protocols, vendors should support running your own code and monitoring custom protocols/endpoints.
• Script Editor: If you record a sequence in the UI, this feature lets you manually edit the script generated by the recorder to further customize it.
• Support for Selenium: Selenium is a powerful scripting language commonly used in QA that helps avoid vendor lock-in as you build a library of scripts.

Synthetic monitoring administration

Finally, do not underestimate the importance of managing and handling your synthetic monitoring tools. The features described in this section are meant to save you time as the tool’s administrator, including the ability to receive notifications in Slack instead of email and the option to export data in a specific format, such as CSV. 

Typically, it is important for administrators to have access to a REST API, for instance, to programmatically integrate the performance monitoring tool with existing automated DevOps processes. Another helpful administrative feature is Single Sign-On (SSO), which integrates with your directory services and helps avoid laborious manual access management. You must also consider compliance and security measures to safeguard your data and ensure appropriate training for your team of operations engineers.

• Alert Notifications: Support for email or text notifications is a basic feature of most alerting tools, while native integration with DevOps tools like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and Slack varies by vendor.
• Maintenance Windows: Maintenance windows allow you to stop monitoring and/or alerting during planned maintenance periods to avoid false alerts.
• Support for Webhooks: Webhooks are messages formatted for programmatic consumption. They may be used to extract raw sample data or provide a convenient way to integrate with generated alerts. Some vendors will provide support for them.
• Export to Excel: This option is useful if you want to slice and dice your data in a spreadsheet or simply wish to save a copy for future reference.
• API Support: APIs are necessary to programmatically extract data from your provider’s platform or to integrate it into operational processes.
• Security: Your vendor needs to ensure a secure platform with encryption for critical business data, such as credentials used in simulation scripts.
• Single Sign-on: For a large team, it is helpful to integrate your tool with your directory service to enable single sign-on and avoid the burden of managing user access separately.
• User Teams: Your SSO integration works best when your monitoring tools support user teams with varying permission levels.
• Access Privileges: Some users may only need access to view results, but not the ability to change integrations, receive alerts, or view dashboards. Access privileges allow you to determine the appropriate level of access for each individual user.
• Sub-tenants: If you have multiple business units or application owners accessing your performance monitoring tool, you can set them up as sub-tenants.
• Mobile App: A mobile app will allow you to log in to your monitoring tool while you are out and about, so you do not waste valuable time diagnosing your website or application problem.
• User Analytics: It is helpful for administrators to see user analytics at a glance, for instance, to track which users frequently visit specific pages or to trace configuration changes.
• Customer Support: Your overall customer success depends on the vendor support team. Do they have high domain expertise, and are they available 24×7?
• Script Migration Support: If you are using existing scripts, such as Selenium, for QA testing, you will want to migrate them to your performance monitoring tool. Some vendors provide this kind of support.
• Training: It is helpful for all training materials to be available online as a self-service option, but also be available as custom training for a group of operators.
• Customer Success Manager (CSM): Customer success managers proactively help customers with regular implementation, updates, and configuration reviews, in addition to providing any required platform support on an ongoing basis.
• Certification: If you have a large team, it can help to certify your team on your performance monitoring tool, especially since turnover will likely impact your team’s knowledge base over time. Certification provides a useful record of training and boosts enthusiasm and company buy-in for the tool.

Conclusion

The field of synthetic monitoring has attracted many newcomers in recent years who have typically avoided the heavy investment required to deploy a worldwide network of monitoring nodes across all types of networks. This investment in a holistic monitoring strategy that encompasses a wide network of distributed vantage points is essential for determining performance issues at every segment in the path between your application platform and your end users. Many vendors in the synthetic monitoring space rely solely on public cloud providers to project an impression of global coverage while ignoring the Internet Service Providers (ISP) used by your customers to access the Internet, the various points along the backbone of the Internet, and the wireless antennas of mobile operators.

The success of your performance monitoring strategy depends on the test types offered to address every use case, the sophistication of the analytics that can be applied to the raw data collected during monitoring, and the management features that will make your life simpler as a tool administrator. We recommend asking the hard questions of your synthetic monitoring tool upfront before finalizing your vendor selection.

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