Synthetic monitoring

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Synthetic monitoring is an industry-standard method to monitor applications’ availability and performance by simulating user interactions from different geographic locations. Synthetic monitoring in Instana enables proactive, automated testing of application availability and performance by simulating user interactions from various geographic locations. This approach helps ensure that critical business workflows function as expected, even in the absence of real user traffic.

Synthetic monitoring is supported on Instana SaaS, Standard Edition, and Custom Edition.

Note: Synthetic monitoring is not supported on Classic Edition.

With Synthetic monitoring on Instana, you can perform the following tasks:

  • Proactively identify issues: You can immediately get notified when the application or service is not available in a region of the world. After you know your application or service is available, you need to be sure that you are also notified when the the critical business flows are not working as expected from functional and performance perspectives. You can even create a set of tests and notifications to understand how the third party your application or service depends on are behaving.

  • Third-party dependency monitoring: You can configure synthetic tests and alerting mechanisms to assess the behavior and reliability of third-party services your application depends on.
  • Reduced Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR): With Synthetic tests you can identify issues before they affect users. Instana provides contextual data—such as backend requests, logs, network timings, HAR files, and video recordings—to accelerate root cause analysis and resolution.
  • Market expansion readiness: When starting in new regions, synthetic tests validate application performance in the absence of user traffic, helping ensure a smooth experience from day one
  • Performance goal validation: You can use data from Synthetic test results to define and validate Service Level Objectives (SLOs), helping teams meet performance targets consistently.
  • Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD Integration) for safe deployments: Synthetic tests can be embedded into CI/CD pipelines to validate performance before code reaches production. This reduces the risk of regressions and helps ensure deployment quality.

To access Synthetic monitoring, click Synthetic Monitoring in the navigation menu. You can see a page that lists the Synthetic tests that you created. You can also see the Locations tab. An entry is added in the tab if you deploy your self-hosted PoP.

If you are unable to see Synthetic Monitoring in the navigation menu, see Setting permissions for Synthetic monitoring.

You can monitor endpoints by creating and managing Synthetic tests and Smart Alerts for such tests. For more information about monitoring endpoints, see Monitoring endpoints with Synthetic tests.

Synthetic monitoring is integrated with some other capabilities of Instana. For more information, see Instana integration.