Application performance directly shapes user experience—impacting satisfaction, workforce productivity, prospect conversion, and customer retention. Slow or unreliable applications frustrate users and damage business outcomes and brand reputations. Synthetic monitoring offers a proactive way to detect issues before they affect end users.
A synthetic monitoring tool conducts monitoring from the front end to measure the user experience. Such tools measure the availability and performance that your critical applications deliver to end users.
To do so, a synthetic monitoring tool:
With proactive measurements, conducted within a defined usage context, you can track conformity with your service level agreements (SLAs) and diagnose unavailability and poor performance as perceived by your users and customers. Alerting and diagnostic features help technical teams get to the bottom of real and potential issues, even before they become a problem for end users.
In synthetic transaction monitoring, robots are automated agents—software tools or virtual machines—that perform actions on applications just like a real user would: clicking, typing, navigating through screens. They operate continuously and from various locations to simulate user behaviour at regular intervals.
Test scripts are the predefined instructions that tell these robots what to do. A script might define a typical user journey—logging onto a business application, searching for a product on a website, adding it to a cart, and checking out. All or part of such a journey is considered to be a transaction. The robot runs that script over and over to verify that everything works as expected.
So, robots perform the actions, while scripts define the scenario. This setup allows businesses to proactively detect performance slowdowns or failures—even outside business hours—before they impact real users.
💡 Good to know:
A good synthetic monitoring tool offers many functions for simulating user paths (the way users would use and application). Among these are keyboard actions, mouse actions, OCR, image recognition, etc. |
The results from synthetic monitoring are captured and analysed in real time. They are returned in the form of dashboards that visualise performance trends, availability, error rates, and other mission-critical information.
This front-end data may also be integrated into technical (back-end) application performance tools or hypervisor cockpits to give you the larger picture of application performance with deep user-side insights.
Alerts can be set to notify operators when issues arise—often before users notice—enabling faster response.
Built-in diagnostic tools help technical teams quickly identify the root cause of incidents or performance degradation, whether it’s a network bottleneck, code regression, or third-party service delay.
Detailed reports support service level tracking, long-term optimisation, and effective communication across IT and business teams. This actionable insight enhances operational resilience and guides strategic decisions.
💡 Good to know:
| All of these depend on your choice of monitoring tool, the options it offers, and the capabilities of its various features. For example, if you are already using back-end, technical monitoring tools, your front-end synthetic monitoring should provide possibilities for integrating its data into the larger picture. |
Synthetic monitoring detects issues before users are impacted, significantly reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) through early alerts and diagnostics.
Automated tests run around the clock or during specific timeframes, providing uninterrupted visibility into application performance—even outside business hours or during low-traffic periods.
By simulating user journeys, synthetic monitoring identifies friction points and performance lags, enabling continuous improvement of the digital experience. In a context of forseeable change, you can even plan ahead to optimize the user experience through load testing, which is based on synthetic monitoring technology.
Reliable performance data supports service level agreement (SLA) tracking and compliance, offering proof of service levels delivered to users and clients.
💡 Good to know:
Such benefits depend on the features that make the synthetic monitoring tool able to provide you with actionable insights: adaptable and integratable dashboards, real-time alerting options, flexible scheduling options, a range of diagnostic tools, and customizable KPI reporting capabilities. Customer support or assistance packages are also something to consider. |
As is true of practically everything, there are some challenges inherent to synthetic monitoring that you need to be aware of. Knowing about these challenges can help you to ask the right questions to decide which monitoring tool is best suited to your needs.
It goes without saying that scripts are built to run on a specific version of the application of website being monitored, and should be adapted to special events (for example, a website during a marketing campaign). As applications change, scripts must be updated.
While synthetic monitoring is proactive and able to monitor 24/7, it is not a real-user, and so does not deliver insights into the specific context of each actual user (type of device, type of connection, etc.). That type of information is best covered by RUM solutions.
💡 Good to know:
| Depending on the synthetic monitoring solution you choose, there may be responses to these challenges, for example through artificial intelligence features, or by complementing synthetic monitoring with real-user sources of information about application performance. |
Here are some key points to keep in mind at the outset of a project to implement front-end synthetic transaction monitoring for your applications:
Focus on the most business-critical user journeys—such as logins, checkouts, or data entry workflows—to ensure you’re monitoring what truly matters to customers and employees.
Establish clear performance and availability thresholds to trigger timely alerts, helping teams prioritise and respond to issues before they affect users.
Select a monitoring tool that supports your technical environment, integrates with existing systems, and offers actionable insights through dashboards, alerts, and diagnostic features.
Solutions like Ekara provide essential visibility to maintain smooth, high-quality digital experiences. Ekara synthetic monitoring is called robot monitoring. Robots act as end users with high value-added features.
Ekara shared robots (public) are distributed across hundreds of locations (“nodes”) around the world connected to the core of the main operators’ networks.
Ekara can also operate with dedicated or private robots installed on request within an intranet environment in response to the needs of a specific measurement environment or customer preference to manage monitoring internally.
Each robot in this active metrology network runs user journeys to provide application performance indicators that reflect the service delivered to users. They alert you 24/7 in the event of anomalies, incidents or downtime, which are detected by integrity checks and data consistency checks.
Whether the robots are shared or dedicated, they trace the user’s experience of applications under standard usage conditions (end customers, nomadic staff, etc.) in a stable and controlled calibrated environment.
Designed for proactive 24/7 front-end testing of the availability and performance of all types of application (web apps, website, thick-client, thin-client, mobile, voice/IVR, and even APIs), in any environment (intranet, internet, cloud), from the user’s standpoint. Ekara has your mission-critical business software covered! Find out more about Ekara Robot monitoring for thick-client applications.
Rising to the challenges of noise reduction, change management, and scalability, Ekara Robot monitoring is evolving with AI-driven insights that pre-qualify test results to reduce noise and also handle unexpected behaviors in applications. Such developments save time and resources by helping teams focus on what’s important and making test scenarios resilient to change.
In Ekara Studio, creating user journeys is straightforward and intuitive. A multitude of function libraries and AI features are included to make your user journeys representative of user behaviors and resilient to unexpected changes. Ekara improves the productivity of your teams by simplifying the operational upkeep of your user journeys.
Another of Ekara’s strengths is that offers “hybrid” monitoring by combining its robot monitoring technology with its RUM technologies. Ekara offers two types of RUM technology, both of which measure actual users’ interactions with the application in real time as they navigate the application’s interface to perform tasks.
| Ekara Robot Monitoring (synthetic transaction monitoring for all applications) | Ekara RUM (real-user monitoring for web and web-based applications) |
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Synthetic monitoring empowers organisations to proactively manage application performance, ensuring seamless user experiences across all environments. With advanced tools like Ekara, businesses gain essential visibility, faster diagnostics, and future-proof resilience for digital services that never miss a beat.