Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Finding the Root Cause of Poor Website Performance using Synthetic Transaction Monitoring

Before you begin reading further: Are you offering products, services, or solutions online? Does your business depend on user activity on your website? If the answer is yes, you should be reading this post, and sharing it with your IT team, too.

For companies that depend on online transactions on their website—could be a retail store selling consumer goods, could be a bank with online banking facility, could be a healthcare or insurance provider with online services, or could be just any organization small or large that drive business based on activity on their website—there are three important things to keep track of:

1. Availability (or uptime) of the website

2. Performance of the website (response time, proper loading of web page elements, etc.)

3. Online user experience (how various operations of a web page work in real time)

Online user experience is a key factor in influencing the site visitor to engage in further activity on your site. This is not just the appearance and functionality of the website, but also the responsiveness in performing the intended action for the online visitors as they are interacting with it.

For example, when users are logging into their account, clicking on a certain element on the site, making a selection, buying on the shopping cart, etc., the website should be able to perform the intended action correctly and quickly. It is the combination of these two characteristics that help define a successful website transaction.

SYNTHETIC TRANSACTION MONITORING

is one of the abilities of website monitoring tools to run these transactions as synthetic tests, just as if a site visitor would perform the steps in real time. You can test and measure how the transaction performed for the user.

Benefits of Synthetic Transaction Monitoring

  • Find faults and performance issues in website interactions before they impact end-users.
  • Run tests from multiple locations and browsers for objective results of user experience.
  • Compare test results with baseline site performance for more meaningful insight into issues.
  • Identify root-cause of poor website performance: which element on the web page is causing performance to slow down, which function of the web page is not responding properly and why, etc.

 

Synthetic Transaction Monitoring Using Pingdom®

Pingdom offers synthetic transaction monitoring as one of its capabilities to measure website performance in addition to website uptime monitoring and real user monitoring.

Eliminating the need to build complicated scripts for synthetic monitoring tests, Pingdom allows you to use a highly-interactive and user-friendly editor to develop a set of commands and validations that you can use to execute tests at periodic intervals of time and report on website performance and behavior.

  • A command is an instruction given to the check to perform an action such as clicking on a button or going to a URL.
  • A validation is the user definition of the intended outcome of the command such as what should happen when a click operation is performed or whether the URL typed is being properly routed to or not.

 

STM1

Once the test is built, you can run the test from different locations and from different browsers. You can also receive transaction monitoring results via email and SMS to keep you informed of baseline deviations in website performance. Start monitoring website transactions and steps, and make sure your website performance is as expected for everyone all the time.

STM2

Read this blog to learn how to use Pingdom transaction monitoring. Use this cheat sheet as ready reckoner when building transaction monitoring checks using Pingdom.

 

Author: Vinod Mohan is a Product Marketing Manager at SolarWinds.

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Can gzip Compression Really Improve Web Performance?

Last updated: February 26, 2024 The size of the web is slowly growing. Over [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free