To give your customers a top-quality digital experience, it’s important to make sure your applications are always working properly. Synthetic monitoring, also known as synthetic testing, can help to confirm your applications are performing as intended, and if they’re not, help you quickly figure out what’s going on. Although synthetic monitoring tools have become a crucial part of application performance monitoring, not all solutions cover all types or yield the best results.

As modern cloud architectures are evolving, so too are the ways users can interact with your applications. We’ll get into how the different types of monitoring work, but first, some background.

What is synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring is an application performance monitoring practice that emulates the paths users might take when engaging with an application. It uses scripts to generate simulated user behavior for different scenarios, geographic locations, device types, and other variables.

After collecting and analyzing this valuable performance data, a synthetic monitoring solution can:

• Give you crucial insight into how well your application is performing
• Automatically keep tabs on application uptime and tell you how your application responds to typical user behavior
• Zero in on specific business transactions — for example, by alerting you to issues users might experience while attempting to complete a purchase or fill out a web form

How does synthetic monitoring work?

In synthetic monitoring, a robot client application that has been installed on a browser, device, or computer transmits a series of automated transactions to your application. These server calls and testing scripts simulate an end user’s clickstream as they navigate through key areas of your application. Typically, they run every 15 minutes, but you can configure them for different frequencies or to run immediately based on a specific action.

Once the robot client receives a response from your application, it reports the results back to the synthetic monitoring system. If the client detects an error during one of its regularly scheduled synthetic tests, the monitoring system will ask it to run that test again. If the follow-up test also results in an error, then the monitoring system will consider the error confirmed and escalate it within the organization as appropriate.

Teams can configure synthetic monitoring tools in various ways according to a company’s requirements. For example, you can set up a robot client on a machine that’s located behind your firewall to confirm that the internal environment is running as you expected, or you can deploy a robot client to a computer outside the firewall to get a sense of how well an application is performing. If you want a more comprehensive view of application availability and performance, you can configure several robot clients on browsers in multiple locations.

Synthetic monitoring vs. real user monitoring

Synthetic monitoring is often compared with another application performance technique known as real user monitoring (RUM). As the name suggests, RUM tracks actions taken by actual users instead of emulating them. Organizations often implement RUM by injecting JavaScript code into a webpage and then collecting performance data in the background as actual users interact with that page.

So, what is synthetic monitoring typically used for, and when might a business decide to use RUM instead? Synthetic monitoring is often helpful to identify short-term performance issues that may impact the user experience while an application is still under development. Early detection helps businesses nip potential performance issues in the bud. This approach is handy for regression testing and production site monitoring, for example. Real user monitoring, by contrast, can help a business understand long-term trends in an application’s performance after it has been deployed.

Why use synthetic monitoring?

If your application doesn’t perform well when your customers try to use it, they will quickly leave in pursuit of a better customer experience. This could play out in a variety of ways. For example:

• High bounce rates. Your website might take too long to load, resulting in a high bounce rate. Or, you might be lagging behind your competitors when it comes to application performance without even knowing it. This will hurt your ability to acquire new customers and grow your market share.
• Difficulty troubleshooting. Even when your organization is aware something is amiss with an application, it may not know where to begin troubleshooting. When it comes to application performance, IT teams can’t always get to the bottom of what’s going on quickly — especially when they’re overextended and juggling several priorities. And while your people are in the dark and searching for answers, your organization could feel an immediate and significant impact on its bottom line.

Emulating user behavior paths in a test environment helps you avoid these issues so you can:

• Monitor system health. Synthetic monitoring can tell you if your website is available, how fast it’s running, if key transactions are functioning as expected, and where a potential slowdown or failure might lie.
• Improve performance. Over time, synthetic monitoring can give you performance benchmarks, highlighting areas for improvement and optimization.
• Prevent issues early. You can also use synthetic monitoring to find and fix potential errors before they affect your users, raising the bar on the user experience. This is particularly useful in continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) environments.
• Increase resiliency. Synthetic monitoring can also help you prepare for peak traffic periods or anticipate performance requirements in a new region or market.

Synthetic monitoring tools are also useful for making sure you’re honoring service level agreements (SLAs) with your end-users. If an issue comes up involving third-party providers, you will be better equipped to hold them accountable, as well.

Types of synthetic monitoring

Synthetic monitoring usually includes three types: availability monitoring, web performance monitoring, and transaction monitoring.

• Availability monitoring enables an organization to confirm that a site or application is available and responding to requests. Availability monitoring can also use a more granular approach — for example, by checking to make sure specific content is available or that a specific type of API call is successful.
• Web performance monitoring typically looks at specific web metrics such as page load speed and the performance of specific elements on a webpage. It checks web content, errors, and sluggish response times.
• Transaction monitoring attempts to complete specific transactions such as logging in, completing a form, and checkout.

Within the realm of synthetic monitoring, there are also two main categories of synthetic tests:

• Browser tests – a robot client simulates a transaction a user might attempt (such as making a purchase)
• API tests – an organization monitors specific endpoints across each layer of the network and application infrastructure

Within API tests, there are different types of tests, including HTTP, SSL, and DNS. For example, API tests often use HTTP tests to monitor application uptime and responsiveness. Meanwhile, SSL tests confirm if users can securely complete transactions on a site using valid SSL certificates, and DNS tests make sure the site’s DNS resolution and lookup times are within expected parameters. A company might use multiple API tests to monitor whether a specific workflow is working properly from end to end — this type of API monitoring is called a multistep API test.

Challenges of synthetic monitoring

Modern applications are inherently complex. Because users access them from a variety of locations and contexts, synthetic monitoring is often not comprehensive enough to account for all the potential errors or situations that might arise. DevOps teams are accounting for this problem by placing a higher priority on introducing application testing earlier in the software development life cycle. However, synthetic monitoring is still often difficult to properly set up without specialized technical knowledge, and it is time-consuming even for the team members that have the required skill set.

Synthetic tests aren’t very resilient, and they can easily fail when small UI changes are introduced, generating unnecessary alert noise. This means that whenever a minor application element such as a button is changed, the corresponding test must be, too. And lastly, many synthetic monitoring tools lack the context needed to explain why a specific failure happened or what the business implications might be, lengthening time to resolution and making it unnecessarily difficult to prioritize application performance issues.

Benefits of synthetic monitoring

Proactive Monitoring: Synthetic monitoring allows you to proactively spot performance issues and availability problems. By imitating user interactions, it identifies irregularities before they impact real users. This early detection helps prevent potential outages and ensures a smoother user experience.

Global Testing: You can assess your application’s performance in various locations. Synthetic tests run from multiple regions, providing insights into regional variations in performance.

Browser and Device-Specific Testing: Synthetic monitoring lets you evaluate your application’s behavior across different browsers and devices. This helps identify compatibility issues and ensures consistent performance for all users.

Works Inside and Outside the Firewall: Unlike Real User Monitoring (RUM), which relies on actual users, synthetic monitoring can be completely automated and run inside and outside your organization’s network. This flexibility ensures comprehensive coverage.

Automated with Regular Frequency: Synthetic monitoring can run at regular intervals, such as every minute or hour, 24/7. This continuous monitoring ensures timely detection of any performance degradation.

Synthetic monitoring tools

A good synthetic monitoring solution should give your organization complete, 24/7 visibility into your applications. To accomplish this, it should include the following kinds of synthetic monitors:

• Single-URL browser monitors. A single-URL browser monitor simulates the experience a user would have while visiting your application using an up-to-date web browser. When run frequently from public and private locations, a browser monitor can alert you when your application becomes inaccessible or when baseline performance degrades significantly.
• Browser click paths. Browser click paths also simulate a user’s visit, but they monitor specific workflows in your application. An advanced synthetic monitoring solution can let you record the exact sequence of clicks and user actions you want to monitor, then set the browser click path to automatically run at regular intervals.
• HTTP monitors. HTTP monitors are useful for monitoring whether specific API endpoints are available, and they can also perform straightforward HTTP checks to confirm single-resource availability. HTTP monitoring tools should allow you to set up performance thresholds for HTTP monitors, too.

Synthetic monitoring use cases

Financial Services

Online Banking Systems: Synthetic monitoring ensures that online banking platforms remain available and responsive for users.

Payment Gateways: Monitoring payment gateways helps prevent transaction failures and delays.

Trading Platforms: Synthetic tests verify the performance of trading systems, which are critical for financial institutions.

Healthcare Technology

Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems: Synthetic monitoring ensures EHR systems are accessible and responsive for healthcare professionals.

Patient Portals: Monitoring patient portals helps maintain seamless communication between patients and healthcare providers.

Telehealth Platforms: Synthetic tests validate the reliability of telehealth services, especially during high-demand periods.

General Web Applications

Availability Testing: Proactively detect failures even when there is no user traffic (for example, off business hours).

API Endpoints: Monitor the availability and performance of third-party API endpoints.

How Dynatrace can power your synthetic monitoring

If you’re thinking about better understanding how your applications are performing, you might be wondering what synthetic monitoring tools you need to get started. You’ll want to pick a solution that simulates business-critical journeys through your most important applications across your mobile and web channels. This can give you immediate answers to questions about application availability and the impact it’s having on the user experience. Your synthetic monitoring solution should also be able to help you quickly identify the root cause of any application performance issue so you can resolve it as soon as possible.

Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring provides all the information you need to know the moment an application’s performance falters. By using all major desktop and mobile browsers to simulate user activity, Dynatrace helps ensure that web, mobile, cloud, and streaming transactions go smoothly for customers around the globe.

This is key for evaluating whether applications meet your SLA requirements, and it can determine whether business outcomes have been impacted. It can also eliminate troubleshooting through AI-driven automation, as well as rank problems in order of importance to the business — significantly reducing the time required for your IT team to identify and address root causes.

To catch those longer-term trends, Dynatrace RUM uniquely captures the full visibility of the customer experience to eliminate user experience blind spots, and Session Replay provides indisputable video evidence of the complete digital experience, so business, development and operations stakeholders can collaborate and agree where to make improvements.

These advanced digital experience monitoring capabilities help you proactively identify and address application performance issues from anywhere in the world. With the right synthetic monitoring solutions in place, your business can go a long way toward ensuring a consistent, satisfying customer experience.

The post What is synthetic monitoring? appeared first on Dynatrace news.

The experiences users have with your digital touchpoints create a lasting impression. In an increasingly online world, these digital experiences are often the most important interaction users have with your brand.

Organizations are constantly being measured against the best available digital experiences — coming from Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other industry leaders. These heightened expectations are applied across every industry, whether in government, banking, insurance, e-commerce, travel, etc. Even if an app has minimal competition, users expect digital experiences to be seamless and responsive. But what is digital experience exactly, and what can you do to ensure you’re delivering the best experiences possible?

What is digital experience?

A digital experience (DX) is a user’s interaction with a digital touchpoint — whether purchasing an item online, receiving updates from a mobile app, or power-using a business platform. A digital touchpoint may be a mobile application, a website, a smart TV, ATM, airport check-in kiosk, point-of-sale terminal, etc.

Some of the factors that affect user experience include:

• Availability: Is the touchpoint available when the user wants to use it?
• Performance: Is the interaction as seamless and fast as possible, or does the user always have to wait to achieve their goal?
• Errors: Are there any errors or broken components hindering the user from interacting with the touchpoint?
• User flow: Can the user actually achieve what they want to do? Was their operation successful?
• Usability: Are the needed functions easy to find? Is the functionality frictionless to use?

Monitoring digital experiences has become increasingly critical for organizations to maintain their competitive edge. Just as a shop owner wants to know if their customers are having difficulty locating a product or accessing the store, owners of digital services want to know users’ pain points as they navigate their offerings.

One advantage of digital experience over physical interaction is the tooling and technologies that are available to monitor and potentially improve the experience for your users.

Why is delivering zero-friction digital experiences so critical?

Poor digital experiences often result in lost business — switching to a competitor’s offering is just a tap or mouse click away. If that competitor delivers a better experience, you’ve lost not only a transaction but the future business of a once-loyal customer. You may think you can rely on customer loyalty, but according to McKinsey, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 75% of U.S. consumers have tried new brands or outlets, diminishing the loyalty factor. Working on a customer win-back strategy is cost-intensive and not always fruitful, which makes having an excellent DX more crucial than ever.

Another risk of a bad user experience is the company’s brand reputation. One could argue that having a mobile app in the app store with a 1-star rating is worse than having no app at all. Some startups undergo expensive rebrandings just to get rid of the negative image created by a single bad mobile app deployment to the app store.

What ruins a digital experience?

Here are a few reasons user experiences can fail.

1. Digital touchpoint outage

This is the hard fail. There is nothing worse than your well-designed digital touchpoint simply falling offline. Identifying an outage was easier in the past when all the services were delivered directly from your hosted data centers. But cloud transformation makes detecting the epicenter of a failure much more challenging, as outages can be caused by your cloud provider, a third party helping deliver personalized experiences, your content delivery network (CDN), and many other services you may be leveraging.

Aside from lost revenue, users and customers may be quick to call out your brand on social media when your offering’s availability struggles, as Instagram experienced not long ago.

2. Broken functionality on a critical user path

Another obvious example is an issue in the checkout funnel of an e-commerce store. For a twist on that scenario, consider this example from the car insurance industry.

Today, every car insurance company provides a mobile app. The app should help users in very rare situations, such as a car crash or if they need roadside assistance. In these critical moments, everything must work — no excuses. If the app lets the user down on the worst day of their year, they will remember. When the “contact agent” functionality causes the app to white-screen, the user will be unhappy, and they might confront the app’s owner with a complaint on the Google Play Store where they’ll find a list of competing mobile apps that may be outperforming their current choice. The window of opportunity to save this customer is now very small and closing fast.

3. Soft fails and speedbumps

Besides the outright failures, there is a long list of soft impacts that injure the user experience. Some include:

• Web performance not meeting the user’s expected experience
• Overcomplicated user flows
• Annoying “pop-up” messages distracting the user
• Web screens not displaying on a mobile device correctly
• Touchscreen UI controls too small to tap
• Menu entries not reachable because they disappear on hover
• Overlapping text on browser window resizing
• No error feedback in form inputs
• No constraints in form input fields
• Mixing horizontal and vertical scrolling on mobile

Because of everything that can go wrong, it’s imperative for organizations to constantly track metrics that indicate user satisfaction and have a robust complaint resolution model in place.

Best practices for delivering excellent digital experiences

1. Break down silos. Great digital experiences require the right culture and mindset. No technology, tool, or practice can accomplish this for you. But thinking about delivering experiences for people rather than thinking in silos can give your organization a chance to bring frictionless experiences to the world. What does that mean? Should I not follow a particular practice? Should I not use certain tools?
2. Collaborate and keep an open mind. Practices and tools are required, but to create great user experiences, you need to be open-minded. For example, I was on a call with a company talking about BizDevOps collaboration. Their collaboration efforts were stuck because the marketing, business, and IT teams could not overcome the ownership question for a supporting tool. It shouldn’t matter who owns the tool as long as it fosters collaboration.
3. Decide what to measure. Once you’ve embraced a user journey mindset, start thinking about what matters to you and your users as you define your core KPIs. Or, as site reliability engineers like to say, what are your service-level objectives (SLOs)?
4. Decide how to measure it. It’s important that you agree on what to measure and find one solution for how you measure it — not have each team measuring the same thing with different tools. Without agreeing on the single source of truth, you’ll end up in meetings arguing about metrics instead of helping your users.

Which KPIs should you track to measure digital experience?

A full list of what to track for your applications and services will vary, but here are some basic KPIs to get you thinking in the right direction.

• Number of conversions or number of “dollar making” interactions
• User experience score
• Percentage of crash-free users (mobile specifically)
• Google Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift (specifically for web)
• Availability and Response Time of API (specifically for API driven industries)
• Net promoter score
• Number of failing form field validations
• Number of displayed error messages

Once you have KPIs you want to track and the metrics to quantify them, you’re ready for digital experience monitoring.

How to improve digital experience

Improving digital experience is crucial for businesses aiming to meet the high expectations of today’s tech-savvy consumers. Here are some key strategies to enhance digital experiences:

1. Personalization

Personalization is at the heart of a great digital experience. Utilize data analytics and AI to understand user preferences and behaviors. Tailor content, recommendations, and interactions to individual users. This can significantly increase engagement and satisfaction.

2. Responsive design

Ensure your digital platforms are optimized for all devices. A responsive design adapts to different screen sizes and resolutions, providing a seamless experience whether users are on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. This is essential for maintaining consistency and accessibility.

3. Streamlined navigation

Simplify navigation to help users find what they need quickly and easily. Use clear, intuitive menus and search functionalities. A well-organized site structure reduces frustration and enhances user satisfaction.

4. Fast load times

Speed is critical. Optimize your website and applications to load quickly. Compress images, leverage browser caching, and use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to improve load times. Slow websites can lead to high bounce rates and lost opportunities.

5. Engaging content

Create high-quality, engaging content that resonates with your audience. Use a mix of text, images, videos, and interactive elements to keep users interested. Regularly update content to keep it fresh and relevant.

6. User feedback

Actively seek and incorporate user feedback. Use surveys, feedback forms, and usability testing to understand user needs and pain points. This helps in making informed improvements and shows users that their opinions matter.

7. Security and privacy

Ensure robust security measures to protect user data. Implement SSL certificates, use strong encryption, and comply with data protection regulations like GDPR. Users need to trust that their information is safe.

8. Omnichannel integration

Provide a consistent experience across all channels. Whether users interact with your brand via website, mobile app, social media, or in-store, ensure a unified and cohesive experience. This builds trust and loyalty.

Focusing on these strategies can significantly enhance businesses’ digital experiences, leading to higher user satisfaction, increased engagement, and better business outcomes.

Tools needed to improve digital experience

Enhancing the digital experience requires a suite of tools that work together to create seamless, personalized, and engaging interactions. Here are some essential tools to consider:

• Digital experience monitoring (DEM)

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is essential for optimizing user interactions by incorporating Real User Monitoring (RUM) to track actual user behavior, Synthetic Monitoring to simulate user paths, and Session Replay to visually capture and analyze user sessions for comprehensive insights and improvements.

• Content management system (CMS)

A robust CMS is the backbone of any digital experience strategy. It allows for creating, managing, and distributing digital content across various channels. Popular CMS platforms offer flexibility and scalability to meet diverse content needs.

• Customer data platform (CDP)

A CDP collects and unifies customer data from multiple sources, providing a comprehensive view of each customer. This data is crucial for personalizing experiences and understanding customer behavior. Leading CDPs enable businesses to deliver targeted and relevant content.

• Analytics and insights tools

Analytics tools are essential for understanding user behavior and measuring the effectiveness of digital strategies. They can provide detailed insights into user interactions, helping businesses make data-driven decisions to optimize their digital experiences.

• Personalization engines

Personalization engines use AI and machine learning to deliver customized content and recommendations. These tools analyze user data to create personalized experiences that increase engagement and satisfaction.

• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems

CRM systems help manage customer interactions and relationships. They integrate with other tools to provide a unified view of customer data, enabling personalized communication and improved customer service.

• Marketing automation platforms

Marketing automation tools streamline and automate marketing tasks like email campaigns, social media posts, and lead generation.

• User feedback tools

Gathering user feedback is vital for continuous improvement. Tools like these allow businesses to collect and analyze feedback, helping them understand user needs and pain points.

• Security and privacy tools

Ensuring data security and privacy is paramount. Tools like SSL certificates, encryption software, and compliance management platforms help protect user data and ensure adherence to regulations like GDPR.

By leveraging these tools, businesses can create a cohesive and engaging digital experience that meets the needs of their users and drives business success.

Digital experience monitoring with Dynatrace

With increasing competition among service providers to win user loyalty and meet users’ constantly increasing expectations, delivering excellent digital experiences is more important than ever. The key to delivering excellent digital experiences is the ability to see and understand the entire user journey.

Dynatrace offers comprehensive digital experience monitoring and business analytics that drive to the heart of the user journey. The Dynatrace DEM solution includes Real User Monitoring, Session Replay, and Synthetic Monitoring, that enables you to capture the right metrics so you can tailor and optimize user experiences. Together with the Business Analytics solution, you can start optimizing your digital channel for better business outcomes and at the same time improve collaboration between IT and LoB stakeholders.

For example, Dynatrace tracks many common KPIs by default, and supports the addition of custom KPIs for metrics more specific to your business needs.

The four screenshots below show a single user session through the lens of four different stakeholders. The insights cover which marketing campaign brought the user to the touchpoint (upper left), the session replay of an error (upper right), the waterfall analysis of a poorly performing interaction (lower left), and the stack trace of the error message detailing the technical issue the customer was facing (lower right).

Dynatrace rolls up all this digital experience data into meaningful metrics for IT teams and business stakeholders, giving them a real-time overview of how digital experience impacts business success. With this insight, teams can instantly see the root cause of any issues, or trigger automatic responses to resolve issues before they impact the user experience.

What makes the Dynatrace approach so compelling for companies on digital transformation journeys is the breadth of solutions integrated into an open platform. With AIOps at the core of the Dynatrace platform, you can capitalize on the end-to-end visibility over your entire software stack to harness data from every digital touchpoint into actionable insight.

The post What is digital experience? appeared first on Dynatrace news.