Synthetic monitoring means making artificial requests to your site or API from external locations on a fixed schedule and judging the results. The checks range from a simple HTTP request to a multi-step browser script that logs in or adds an item to a cart.
Why it matters
Because it does not depend on visitors, synthetic monitoring works at 3 a.m. on a quiet site and gives a consistent baseline. It catches full outages, expired certificates, DNS failures and broken key pages. It cannot show what real users on different devices and networks experience; that needs real user monitoring.
Example
A useful check asserts more than the status code:
GET https://example.com/pricing
Expect: status 200, response under 3 s, body contains "Start free"
Interval: 5 min Locations: 3 regions Alert after: 2 consecutive failuresRequiring two failures from different locations filters most one-off network blips.
Common mistakes
- Checking only the homepage, which a cache can serve while login or checkout is broken.
- Alerting on a single failed check, producing false alarms.
- Running all checks from one location, so you cannot distinguish a site outage from a local path problem.
- Forgetting that scripted checks need test accounts and should not create real orders.
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