14 Best Synthetic Monitoring Tools in 2024

Synthetic monitoring simulates user interactions with a website or web system to proactively identify performance issues and ensure functionality before impacting real users. It uses automated scripts to test and monitor system behavior from various locations and devices.

Synthetic monitoring uses simulated tests to monitor website or app performance, identifying errors early to ensure a smooth user experience for businesses. In contrast, real user monitoring tracks actual user interactions on a live website.

Geekflare has researched and compiled the best synthetic monitoring tools based on key features such as scalability, user interface, integration options, reporting capabilities, pricing, and usability.

• 1. Checkly – Powered by Playwright
• 2. Dotcom-Monitor – Best for Multi-Step Monitoring
• 3. BetterStack – Best for Small to Medium Business
• 4. Sematext – Best for Overall Website, Infra, and Logs Monitoring
• 5. Pingdom – Best for Transaction Monitoring
• 6. Uptrends – Best for Global Testing Coverage
• 7. Uptime – Best for Global Testing Coverage
• 8. Apica – AI-powered Anomaly Detection
• 9. Site24x7 – Best for Comprehensive IT Monitoring
• 10. AppDynamics – Best for Application Performance Management
• 11. Catchpoint – Best to Emulate User Behavior
• 12. New Relic – Best for All-in-one Infra Observability
• 13. Zabbix – Best for Open Source Flexibility
• 14. Datadog – Best for Large Business
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Checkly

Checkly is a fast, reliable, and cost-effective code-based synthetic monitoring tool for websites and applications. Utilizing the Playwright testing framework, its workflow performs end-to-end browser checks to ensure your vital user flows function correctly.

Checkly tests in real browsers under live events, validating content visibility, browser responses, and error handling in a secure environment. It provides detailed debugging insights, including error traces, screenshots, and videos to help resolve issues.

Checkly monitors performance by collecting data on web vitals and load times for each page to ensure peak performance. With TypeScript support, you can write browser checks that are easy to maintain and enhance the developer experience.

Checkly offers extensive monitoring coverage with over 20 global data center locations and uses private locations to monitor apps behind a firewall in private or hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Checkly Pricing

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Dotcom-Monitor’s synthetic monitoring solution helps you ensure optimal performance, uptime, and functionality. You’ll gain visibility into user flows, transactions, APIs, and network protocols, enabling you to resolve issues early and provide reliable user experiences.

Dotcom-Monitor supports scripting with 40+ web browsers for testing and monitoring web applications. It offers real-time alerts for critical user paths and highly customizable performance metrics.

Dotcom-Monitor runs automated tests to provide actionable insights and recheck historical data to ensure smooth e-commerce checkouts and login forms. You can use the historical data to measure the current state of your web applications.

Dotcom-Monitor integrates with essential apps like Slack, PagerDuty, and Azure to enhance productivity. You also benefit from 24/7 support with real engineers and diverse alert options, including SMS and WhatsApp.

Dotcom-Monitor Pricing

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BetterStack

BetterStack is a comprehensive synthetic monitoring solution for websites and servers. It offers uptime monitoring, incident management, log management, observability dashboards, all-stack support, and thorough debugging.

BetterStack’s alerting system is designed to prevent false alarms. It provides alerts with screenshots and detailed error logs for effective debugging. You can also set multi-channel escalation policies for real-time alerts, including unlimited voice calls.

BetterStack performs checks from 30+ locations and offers customizable escalations and team notifications. Its dedicated status page centralizes monitoring and automatically updates maintenance and error information.

BetterStack Pricing

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Sematext

Sematext is a synthetic availability monitoring tool for web applications, servers, APIs, and mission-critical web transactions. It allows for secure API uptime monitoring and testing over a private network.

With Sematext, you can create public and private status pages that centralize incidents, availability, and performance status. The customizable dashboard makes Sematext a dynamic synthetic testing tool.

Sematext alerts you to issues, measures page load times, and tracks Core Web Vitals and third-party performance. It allows you to diagnose the problems with waterfall analysis and simulate user interactions with a real Google Chrome browser.

Sematext monitors websites and APIs from multiple locations. Its robust alerting system provides notifications through channels like email and Slack. It also supports 100+ integrations and native apps.

Sematext Pricing

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Pingdom

Pingdom Synthetic Monitoring keeps websites running smoothly by detecting issues like slow load times or broken pages before they impact visitors. It provides 24/7 performance monitoring to ensure optimal site performance.

You can test your website’s availability from multiple locations worldwide, identifying performance issues faster. Monitoring critical site functions allows quick problem resolution and maintains customer satisfaction.

Pingdom alert system sends notifications via email or SMS when an issue is detected, allowing you to fix it quickly and reduce downtime. These customizable alerts give you immediate feedback to minimize losses.

Pingdom also offers easy integration with popular apps like Slack and OpsGenie. Its user-friendly interface and developer-friendly API make it accessible to businesses of all sizes. You can test the features with a 30-day free trial.

Pingdom Pricing

Try Pingdom

Uptrends

Uptrends Synthetic Monitoring ensures your website runs smoothly by simulating user actions. It can test your site’s performance and pinpoint issues from over 233 global locations.

Uptrends speed up your site by quickly identifying slow loading times and frequent errors. It identifies where your site is lagging so you can fix problems before they affect your users. Thus, your visitors are happy with an excellent user experience.

Uptrends checks critical functions like logins, forms, and shopping carts, ensuring your website works correctly. It also monitors APIs, essential for sites that rely on them, and sends immediate alerts when issues arise.

Moreover, Uptrends offers easy-to-read dashboards and customizable reports. It helps you rust tests and assess site performance under different situations. Overall, it allows you to make informed decisions to improve the site’s reliability.

Uptrends Pricing

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Uptime

Uptime is the way to go if you are looking for an open-source and code-free website monitoring tool. It is powered by GitHub and checks website uptime every five minutes to ensure consistent performance and reliability.

Uptime imitates user behavior and offers micro-transaction checks, like logging in, to fix troublesome website performance in less than one minute. Its no-code interface is user-friendly for non-technical users to create checks, making it perfect for monitoring website performance and reliability.

Uptime provides real-time actionable alerts with error screenshots and root-cause analysis, enabling prompt action to resolve issues. The alerting system integrates with Slack, Telegram, Discord, Webhooks, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, and more, ensuring you are always informed.

Uptime Pricing

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Apica

Apica is a free real-time synthetic monitoring tool that uses AI and machine learning, providing enterprise-grade capabilities and free access to Prometheus monitoring.

Apica provides customized monitoring dashboards that you can share via URLs. You can also import Grafan dashboards.

Apica’s alerting system enables users to send alerts to different channels, such as email and Slack. It also provides log insights and visual tools like diagrams and charts for clearer data analysis. Users can view data from various sources on a single dashboard.

Apica Pricing

Apica offers custom pricing for its services, with a demo trial plan.

Try Apica

Site24x7

Site24x7 offers synthetic monitoring for websites, applications, and APIs worldwide, simulating real user interactions. Instant alerts for downtime or performance issues allow for quick resolution before impacting customers.

Site24x7 runs tests from over 120 global locations, ensuring your website or application is always available and performing well. It validates API responses and simulates user actions to catch issues early.

Site24x7 provides customizable options to fit your needs, including check frequency, HTTP methods, and request headers. It uses machine learning to detect and diagnose problems, aiding faster resolution.

Integration with PagerDuty and Slack enhances functionality, helping to fix the issues and ensure high website performance.

Site24x7 Pricing

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AppDynamics

AppDynamics Synthetic Monitoring helps businesses track web application performance and identify issues before they affect users. It monitors website performance across various browsers and locations, sending real-time alerts for quick issue resolution.

AppDynamics offers an overview of the entire application stack, tracking applications, infrastructure, databases, and networks. It helps identify and resolve performance issues to ensure smooth operation.

Integrated with CI/CD pipelines, AppDynamics catches performance problems early in development, ensuring consistent application performance. It also keeps the deployment process smooth and efficient.

AppDynamics Pricing

AppDynamics offers custom pricing for its services with a free trial plan.

Try AppDynamics

Catchpoint

Catchpoint synthetic monitoring helps monitor website, application, and API performance by conducting automated tests to detect and fix issues proactively.

Catchpoint offers over 40 pre-configured and custom monitors, running tests from cloud, backbone, wireless, and last-mile nodes. It provides extensive page load and error rate data for global performance monitoring.

Catchpoint ensures proactive monitoring of your internet stack, using automated browser testing with Playwright and Puppeteer to simulate real-world scenarios. Its performance thresholds prevent false alerts and ensure accurate monitoring.

Additionally, Catchpoint features a real-time alerting system that integrates with tools like Slack and PagerDuty. It informs you of any outages and takes immediate action.

Catchpoint Pricing

Catchpoint is designed around your needs and offers custom pricing for its services with a free test drive.

Try Catchpoint

New Relic

New Relic’s synthetic monitoring tests websites and APIs to catch errors before customers notice them, ensuring smooth application operation even behind firewalls. It uses a JavaScript-like script for advanced tests to gather performance data and record errors, reducing developers’ debugging time.

New Relic stores monitor runs for 13 months to review performance trends and address issues proactively. The device emulation feature enables testing sites across various devices to ensure optimal user experience.

New Relic allows you to add private locations to monitor resources within your firewall or from different geographical areas. With global test coverage, you can check your site’s accessibility from 18+ locations worldwide. It integrates with popular analytics tools, so monitoring doesn’t interfere with your data collection.

New Relic Pricing

New Relic offers custom pricing for its services with a starting free option.

Try New Relic

Zabbix

Zabbix is an all-encompassing open-source synthetic monitoring tool for your IT infrastructure stack, including networks, servers, cloud services, APIs, websites, IoT devices, and applications. This enterprise-grade monitoring tool can be deployed both in the cloud and on-premises.

Zabbix provides a centralized UI for information security with an external vault. It detects real-time anomalies in infrastructure to enable quick action in case of errors.

Zabbix lets you leverage collected data in various ways. It’s equipped with powerful tools for visualizing and analyzing data. With over 250 global partners, it facilitates easy integration. It’s a super flexible and scalable tool that can meet the needs of IT infrastructures of all sizes.

Zabbix Pricing

Zabbix provides custom pricing based on your needs, with a free trial option.

Try Zabbix

Datadog

Datadog’s code-free synthetic monitoring solution includes browser, API, and mobile tests for web applications and networks. Its fast detection capability ensures that users receive a prompt response to issues.

The code-free web recorder simplifies creating customized tests and offers screenshot and session replay features. It has a robust alerting system and workflow automation for sending alerts to relevant teams.

Datadog’s API tests allow you to assess the complete performance of your systems. Its rapid root cause detection facilitates faster response time with a network timing data breakdown.

Datadog’s AI-powered synthetics bring actionable testing insights from AI and integrate with GitLab, GitHub, and Jenkins. The CI/CD integrations enable efficient error management.

Datadog Pricing

Try Datadog

Here, we compare the best synthetic monitoring tools based on monitoring capabilities, scripting, and global locations.

What is Synthetic Monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring is a process that uses automated scripts to simulate user actions to test a website or application’s performance.  It helps find issues with speed, availability, and features before they impact users by running tests from various global locations to mimic user behavior.

Synthetic monitoring makes it easier to find and fix mistakes quickly. You can use the top website uptime checker tools to monitor your site’s uptime and ensure the optimal performance of your website or app.

How Does Synthetic Monitoring Work?

Synthetic monitoring uses automated programming scripts to determine what real people would do on a website or app. These scripts simulate user actions like clicking buttons, filling out forms, and browsing pages to detect potential errors.

Typically, these scripts run at regular intervals, such as every 15 minutes, and can be executed from various global locations to evaluate website performance across different regions.

The monitoring system collects data on response times, page load speeds, and common errors. If any issues are detected, the system promptly alerts the website administrator or IT team, enabling them to address problems before they impact real users.

Benefits of Synthetic Monitoring Tools

Synthetic monitoring tools offer several benefits for maintaining and improving application performance and reliability by simulating user interactions. Here are some of the key benefits:

Proactive problem identification 

Synthetic monitoring tools help identify issues before they impact users by sending alerts for quick fixes. This proactive approach ensures a smooth user experience and prevents revenue loss from unexpected system downtime.

Performance optimization

Synthetic monitoring tools help identify website performance issues, enabling continuous monitoring and optimization for efficient operation under increasing user demands.

Availability and uptime

Synthetic monitoring tools ensure that websites and applications are always accessible and online, alerting to any downtime or access issues. This helps maintain a business reputation and keeps customers happy and trusting.

Benchmarking and regression testing

Synthetic monitoring tools allow you to compare your application’s performance over time based on historical data. It will enable you to see whether new changes make things better or worse for your system. Regular benchmarking helps you find trends and set performance goals, keeping your application stable and improving.

Detailed insights and reporting

Synthetic monitoring tools provide detailed reports and visuals to identify slowdown causes and store performance data, helping prioritize and fix issues.

How to Choose the Right Synthetic Monitoring Tools

Selecting the right synthetic monitoring tools is crucial for maintaining smooth application performance. Consider these key points before making your decision:

Test Complexity

Ensure the synthetic monitoring tool can handle simple and complex tests efficiently, including multi-step actions and API calls.

Geographic Scope

Look for synthetic monitoring tools to run tests from various locations worldwide to uncover regional issues and simulate different network conditions.

Alerting & Reporting

Choose synthetic monitoring tools that provide real-time alerts, detailed reports, and customizable alerts to identify and resolve problems quickly.

Integrations

For easier performance management, opt for synthetic monitoring tools that easily integrate with your current systems, such as CI/CD pipelines and APM tools.

Scalability

Select a synthetic monitoring tool that can grow with your app, supporting more tests and increased traffic to maintain effective monitoring as your user base expands. Additionally, flexible pricing options can help you scale cost-effectively and manage resources efficiently.

Use Cases of Synthetic Monitoring Across Industries

Synthetic monitoring helps businesses ensure their online systems work well by simulating user actions. Here are some ways it benefits eCommerce and SaaS industries:

• Monitor Online Stores and Platforms: Synthetic monitoring checks if inventory systems, shopping carts, and APIs work correctly. It finds problems before customers notice them, making shopping and using software easy and smooth.
• Check checkout and critical Processes: Synthetic monitoring simulates user actions like logging in and making purchases to test payment gateways, checkout processes, and key features. It helps maintain service quality and cart retention.
• Track site and App speed: You can find slow-loading pages and performance problems by monitoring page load times and API response times.
• Benchmark Against Competitors: Synthetic monitoring benchmarks eCommerce and SaaS sites against industry standards and competitors to boost performance, competitiveness, and user experience.
• Prepare for Peak Traffic: Synthetic monitoring helps eCommerce and SaaS platforms prepare for peak periods and avoid crashes and slowdowns by simulating busy times.

Frequently Asked Questions

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