Synthetic monitoring is all about pinpointing user experience issues on your website, mobile apps and internal web services through simulated transactions. Synthetic transactions track website availability, uptime and response metrics at regular intervals across global locations so you can keep your customers happy and prevent revenue leakages. With synthetic monitoring, you can confidently assess the state of your web applications by simulating how these services are actually used by customers.
In our latest Tech Talk, I share some of the challenges with stand-alone synthetic monitoring tools and explain how you can incorporate synthetics into your IT operations management workflows. You’ll also learn why a digital operations command center is your best bet for business transaction monitoring.
The Trouble with Point Tools
IT teams purchase synthetic availability monitoring tools for observing web apps from an end-user perspective. While point tools offer useful metrics, most IT operations and infrastructure management teams don’t effectively use these performance insights to improve actual user experiences.
How do you leverage synthetic monitoring insights for better understanding what your end-users are seeing and doing? You need to add synthetic metrics to your IT operations dashboards for a truly contextual view of system health. OpsRamp combines infrastructure and application monitoring, intelligent alert correlation, and on-demand automation to deliver a Service-Centric AIOps platform built for the modern enterprise. Powered by a multi-tenant SaaS platform, OpsRamp provides a big-picture overview of site reliability by embedding synthetics into your IT operations process flows.
OpsRamp bridges the world of infrastructure management with user experience monitoring so that you are immediately notified when a customer is unable to access your web services. Our synthetic monitors let you know if your users are experiencing sluggish response times or can’t finish their transactions due to a broken process. We offer synthetics support for HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, FTP, PING, POP3, SMTP, SSL, TCP and UDP, so that you can quickly identify performance bottlenecks and maintain your service levels:
- HTTP - Graph response times for your website over time. Drill down on recent outages and see what’s causing the performance degradation.
- PING - Track response times and packet loss for an entire application.
- SNMP - Monitor email deliverability rates.
- SSL - Replace SSL certificates before their expiration date.
- TCP - Monitor websites on a certain port.
Figure 1 - Measure uptime, downtime and average latency for critical web services.
Deliver The Right User Experience With Improved Site Performance
When you add a synthetic monitor in OpsRamp, you can define relevant metrics (response times, connection times and error rates) and then create alert policies by specifying repeat count, warning and critical thresholds. OpsRamp lets you embed synthetics into your alert management framework so that you can reduce downtime, drive faster incident response and eliminate the need for a separate synthetics tool.
Our Alert Browser lets you aggregate metrics and alerts from different web services linked to a common process and creates views to filter out contextual alerts. You can also convert synthetic alarms in OpsRamp into a service desk ticket (through robust integrations with ServiceNow, Cherwell, and BMC Remedy), for prompt incident resolution and remediation. You can also route synthetic notifications to specific team members like business sponsors and application owners using communication channels like email, voice, text, and chat and combine notifications with incident-type escalations based on shift rosters.
Figure 2 - Track and enhance web application performance with OpsRamp.
It’s time to break down the silos between synthetic monitoring and IT service delivery. OpsRamp’s visualizations for service uptime, downtime and response times let you maximize the availability and performance of your web apps. With OpsRamp synthetics, you can centralize, consolidate and unify operational insights for your web apps and services in a single place.
Next Steps:
- Check out our tech talk on AIOps and alert inferencing.
- Find out what’s new in the OpsRamp platform.
- Schedule a custom demonstration with a solution consultant today.
