When a synthetic monitor runs it typically hits a website or calls an API. It can even perform a whole simulated user journey potentially hitting multiple APIs, multiple pages, even multiple websites. Each time a monitor makes a request to a website or an API one or more applications or services behind that website or API get executed. Very often one or more databases are involved as well.

When you configure a monitor you typically configure it to fail when the website or API returns a non-2XX response code; or when the response takes more than some number of seconds; or if the response contains the word “error”. However, when a monitor fails you don’t know why that happened. You don’t know the root cause. Why was it that it took so long for the response to be returned? Why was there a 500 error response? Without knowing the root cause how can you fix the problem so it doesn’t happen again?

You can now discover the likely root cause of a failed monitoring run by accessing the exact logs or trace spans (in other words: a single, distinct unit of work or operation within an application) associated with exactly that failure.

To make this possible you will want to instrument as much of your product with OpenTelemetry as possible, although you do not need to instrument everything all at once. It can be done incrementally. But the more you instrument the easier it will be not only to find the root cause of synthetic monitor failures, but also get really valuable insights into all kinds of errors and latency issues that you were previously unaware of.

What you want to do is the following:

• Instrument your frontend: https://sematext.com/docs/tracing/sdks/javascript-browser/
• Instrument your backend: https://sematext.com/docs/tracing/sdks/

When you instrument your application you will be able to correlate failures with traces, with logs, and correlate failed monitors with metrics.

To learn more about correlation of synthetic runs with traces, logs and metrics, check the Root Cause Discovery docs.

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