Synthetic Monitoring

Table of Contents

• Overview
• When to Use
• Quick Start
• Reference Guides
• Best Practices

Overview

Set up synthetic monitoring to automatically simulate real user journeys, API workflows, and critical business transactions to detect issues and validate performance.

When to Use

• End-to-end workflow validation
• API flow testing
• User journey simulation
• Transaction monitoring
• Critical path validation

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

// synthetic-tests.js
const { chromium } = require("playwright");

class SyntheticMonitor {
  constructor(config = {}) {
    this.baseUrl = config.baseUrl || "https://app.example.com";
    this.timeout = config.timeout || 30000;
  }

  async testUserFlow() {
    const browser = await chromium.launch();
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    const metrics = { steps: {} };
    const startTime = Date.now();

    try {
      // Step 1: Navigate to login
      let stepStart = Date.now();
      await page.goto(`${this.baseUrl}/login`, { waitUntil: "networkidle" });
      metrics.steps.navigation = Date.now() - stepStart;

      // Step 2: Perform login
      stepStart = Date.now();
      await page.fill('input[name="email"]', "test@example.com");
      await page.fill('input[name="password"]', "password123");
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide	Contents
Synthetic Tests with Playwright	Synthetic Tests with Playwright
API Synthetic Tests	API Synthetic Tests
Scheduled Synthetic Monitoring	Scheduled Synthetic Monitoring

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Test critical user journeys
• Simulate real browser conditions
• Monitor from multiple locations
• Track response times
• Alert on test failures
• Rotate test data
• Test mobile and desktop
• Include error scenarios

❌ DON'T

• Test with production data
• Reuse test accounts
• Skip timeout configurations
• Ignore test maintenance
• Test too frequently
• Hard-code credentials
• Ignore geographic variations
• Test only happy paths