Synthetic Monitoring is our Web Performance feature that provides testing and monitoring tools, enabling you to proactively monitor and identify performance issues on your website, discover optimization opportunities and benchmark against your competition.
Unlike Real User Monitoring which monitors real user data across your website, Synthetic Monitoring is used to simulate your site’s experience in a controlled “lab” environment, so you can act on any findings before they impact your business.
Feature overview
To get started, from the main menu navigate to the ‘Web Performance’ menu and select ‘Synthetic Monitoring’.
Analyze
From the Analyze tab, create and run tests to analyze the performance of your web pages, or even compare multiple pages, including those of your competitors. Once created, the results will appear in the Reports tab.
Reports
Reports allow you to analyze the web performance tests you created from the Analyze tab. You use these reports to dig deeper into the performance of a tested web page and identify key indicators related to Core Web Vitals and user experience.
There are two types of reports that can be created:
- Standalone reports: create a web performance test for a single page
- Comparison reports: create and compare the performance between your own web pages, or compare yours against your competitors.
These reports can also be accessed via the Dashboard tab and the graphs of any Monitoring.
Dashboard (requires Enterprise or Pro add-on plan)
From the Dashboard tab, quickly jump to or review the high-level performance of your created Reports and any favorited Monitorings.
Scenarios (requires Enterprise or Pro add-on plan)
Scenarios allow you to reproduce the navigation of any user journey, such as; conversion funnels, form completion, and complex journeys with post-login area (and more), to measure their performance.
From the Scenarios tab, you’ll find a list of all your created Scenarios categorized by their priority; ones that need your attention, ones that are still active, or have been disabled. Click into any one to start your Scenario analysis.
Monitoring (requires Enterprise or Pro add-on plan)
Monitoring allows you to track Core Web Vitals and other impactful page performance metrics (such as page weight, blocking time, first byte) of your web pages, including those of your competitors, over time.
Create individual Monitors to automatically track specific page URLs, define the settings you want to be analyzed and schedule the monitoring frequency and get proactive alerts for any anomalies.