No matter which path of the stack you work on, it’s crucial you make sure your website or API is up and running. We wanted to create a tool that can give you superpowers.
Enter, Sematext Synthetics! You can monitor the availability of APIs and websites as well as their performance, and user journeys. This means 24×7 monitoring from multiple locations around the globe with alerts when things go wrong!
Read our official product update here & show your support by giving us an upvote on ProductHunt.
Why did we add a Synthetic Monitoring solution?
With the addition of Synthetics to Sematext Cloud along with infrastructure monitoring, log management, and real user monitoring, you get end-to-end visibility to your application performance.
Sematext Synthetics also provides detailed reports on the availability and performance of your web applications.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you have a website running with Nginx. Your SSL certificate fails to renew and your site breaks. Nginx is still running. You’re not getting alerted because Nginx thinks everything is okay.
By using a tool like Synthetics, you can eliminate these factors with real end-to-end tests. A real request will hit your website and return actionable metrics you can use to either verify it works as it should, or debug if it’s broken.
Side note: We’ve created a use case on How to Extract Numerical Data from a Web Page for Dashboards and Alerting. Make sure you check it out if you’re interested!
What can Synthetics do for you?
After releasing Experience, our end-user monitoring tool. last year, we felt synthetic monitoring would be a perfect addition to Sematext Cloud.
Now with Synthetics, you can get end-to-end visibility of your applications from a single place!
Just some of the things you can do with Sematext Synthetics include:
- Monitor & track availability & performance of APIs
- Monitor SSL certificate expiration time
- Monitor websites and track various web performance metrics like page load time, paint metrics, etc.
- Monitor website uptime
- Monitor individual resource performance in a website by domain, type, and response code
- Create public status page showing the availability of your selected web services and share it with your customers
- Identify slow resources
- Monitor third-party resources performance
- Investigate slow pages & identify bottlenecks using a waterfall chart
- Create user journeys with custom assertions based on the content of the webpage
- Collect and track custom metrics from your sites
- Benchmark against competitors
- Create custom dashboards and alerts based on gathered performance metrics
- Debug downtime with end-to-end visibility of application performance
- Get alerted when things fail via multiple alert channels like email, Slack, Pagerduty, webhooks, etc.
- Monitor websites behind firewalls and on private networks with Private Locations
- Check out the full product update.
At Sematext, we’ve also had the need to monitor application availability. We use Synthetics actively to monitor our own applications and it has helped us uncover issues with our APIs on multiple occasions.
How does Synthetics work?
We send requests to your HTTP endpoints or launch your website in an embedded browser. It’s done from multiple locations around the globe and can record various performance metrics and errors.
As a user, you have two choices. Creating an HTTP or Browser monitor.
An HTTP monitor is used to monitor HTTP endpoints like APIs or Web URLs. It sends a single HTTP request to the configured HTTP endpoints and records the performance and response times.
A Browser monitor is used to monitor a web page or a user journey. It uses a Puppeteer-based script to drive an embedded Google Chrome browser. It runs the script and records the various performance timings and errors. It also captures one or more screenshots of the page so you can visually inspect it as well.
Here, let me show you how it works.
Where to go from here?
What you can do now is sign up for a free trial and try it for yourself. Pricing starts at $2 per month for HTTP monitors and $7 per month for Browser monitors. We have pay-as-you-go pricing if your usage changes or fixed plans if you can estimate your usage.
Synthetics will only get better down the road. We have big plans to add a script recorder, as well as integrations like Lighthouse for performance audits. Stay tuned for more details, we promise it’ll be worthwhile! Until then, stay safe and bug-free.
If you’re looking to improve the overall performance of your website, you might also like to read:
- Best Synthetic Monitoring & Testing Tools
- Best Website Performance and Speed Testing Tools
- Best Website Performance Monitoring Tools
- Best SSL Certificate Monitoring Tools
- Best API Monitoring Tools
- Best Digital Experience Monitoring Tools
- Best Website Uptime Monitoring Software