What Synthetic Monitoring Is#

Synthetic monitoring means actively probing your services on a schedule rather than waiting for users to report problems. Instead of relying on internal health checks or real user traffic to detect issues, you send controlled requests and measure the results. The fundamental question it answers is: “Is my service reachable and responding correctly right now?”

This is distinct from real user monitoring (RUM), which observes actual user interactions. Synthetic probes run 24/7 regardless of traffic volume, so they catch outages at 3 AM when no users are active. They provide consistent, repeatable measurements that are easy to alert on. The tradeoff is that synthetic probes test a narrow, predefined path – they do not capture the full range of user experience.