Web checks have a new name: Synthetic monitoring

Because “Synthetic monitoring” is such a widely used standard term for the automated availability monitoring of web applications, we’ve decided it’s time for a renaming of our web check monitoring functionality.

Dynatrace now offers the following types of synthetic monitors:

• Browser monitors (previously known as “Availability web checks”)
  These monitors simulate a single page view with a real browser. These are perfect for monitoring the availability and performance baselines of your applications.
• Browser clickpaths (previously known as “Clickpath web checks”)
  Clickpaths simulate complete workflows within your application. Dynatrace offers an easy-to-use recorder (a Chrome browser extension) that makes it a breeze to record complex business-critical workflows.
• HTTP monitors (coming soon)
  Sometimes a full-blown browser isn’t required (for example, monitoring the availability of an API endpoint). HTTP monitors use HTTP(S) requests to monitor important aspects of your applications and are also capable of monitoring internal applications, as they run within your infrastructure.

Synthetic monitoring is a key component of digital experience monitoring. Beside traditional use cases, such as pre-production monitoring and performance benchmarking, Dynatrace Synthetic offers unique ways of augmenting real user monitoring with synthetic data. Browser monitors are automatically connected to the corresponding web applications. Also, problems are automatically correlated with root cause analysis so you get an instant idea of the scope of each given outage.

Dynatrace Synthetic also gives you

• Waterfall data based on W3C timings and actionable top findings
• Simulation of various device types, screen sizes & network conditions
• Screenshots of all actions make it easy to compare results when failures occur
• End-to-end visibility, down to the PurePath level
• Modern user experience metrics, like Visually Complete & Speed Index
• Up-to-date browser, currently running Chrome 60
• Easy custom charts that focus on the metrics you’re interested in and provide quick comparisons to the baselines of your competitors

More locations on the way

You can currently schedule synthetic monitors from 15 locations world-wide. We’ll be significantly expanding our synthetic location network over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.