CloudQA Synthetic Monitoring
Synthetic Monitoring for Websites and Web Applications
Replay your most important user journeys, such as login, search and checkout, in real browsers on a schedule against your live site. Find out when a flow breaks or slows down before your customers do.
What is synthetic monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring runs scripted user journeys against your website at regular intervals, whether or not real users are on the site. Instead of only checking that a page returns a 200 status, it signs in, searches, adds to cart and checks out, measuring availability and response time at every step.
CloudQA Synthetic Monitoring builds those journeys with the same codeless CloudQA Recorder you use for regression tests. The flows you already test before a release keep watching production after it. Synthetic monitoring is set up with our team for CloudQA customers.
What synthetic monitoring catches
Frequent releases, third-party scripts and infrastructure changes break things that a simple uptime ping never sees.
Unexpected status codes
404, 403, 500, 502 and 503 errors that appear after a deploy, a configuration change or an expired dependency.
Broken functional flows
Searches that return the wrong results, buttons that do nothing and forms that accept invalid input.
Slow pages and steps
Server-side or front-end slowdowns that only show up at certain times of day or under certain conditions.
Failed logins and forms
Login, sign-up and lead forms that silently stop working, so users cannot get in or reach you.
Faulty carts and payments
Cart, payment and order-confirmation steps that fail. For an online store, uptime is revenue.
Regional problems
Pages that are fast in one region and slow or unavailable in another, depending on CDN or hosting.
CloudQA Synthetic Monitoring features
Everything you need to watch complex, multi-step journeys on modern web applications.
Real-browser journeys
Journeys run in real Chrome and Firefox sessions, including JavaScript- and AJAX-heavy pages and different screen resolutions.
Codeless recording and editing
Record a journey in minutes, then add, change or remove any step without re-recording. Reuse your CloudQA regression tests.
Data-driven monitoring
Build a journey once and run it with different data sets, such as products, accounts or search terms.
Schedules and locations
Run journeys as often as every five minutes, from locations that matter to your business.
Dashboards with drill-down
Availability and performance from application to journey to page level, with up to a year of history.
Alerts where your team works
Email, SMS, Slack and PagerDuty alerts, plus scheduled maintenance windows when monitoring pauses.
Screenshots at every step
See exactly what the browser saw at each step, so you know why a journey failed, not just that it did.
API checks in the same journey
Chain data-dependent REST API calls with browser steps and monitor them together.
Shareable reports
Send detailed, interactive reports to developers and stakeholders with a single link.
Journeys worth monitoring
Login and sign-up
Users expect to sign in 24/7. Monitor login and registration for availability and performance, and be the first to know when they break.
eCommerce checkout
Carts, payment gateways and order confirmations have to run smoothly. Monitor the full path to purchase, not just the home page.
Business-critical workflows
Search, quoting tools, ERP and SaaS workflows, even 90-step journeys with many data variations, such as an online insurance purchase.
How synthetic monitoring works in CloudQA
Record a journey
Click through a critical flow with the CloudQA Recorder. Verify it once as a test so you know it works.
Schedule it
Choose how often it runs, from which locations, in which browsers and with which data.
Act on alerts
Get alerted when a step fails or slows down, then drill into timings and screenshots to find the cause.
Synthetic monitoring vs real user monitoring
The two approaches answer different questions, and most teams use both.
Proactive: catches problems before users do
- Works even when there is no traffic, such as overnight or before a launch
- Same journey, same data and same location every run, so trends are clear
- Tests complete flows, including checkout and logged-in areas
- Alerts the moment a scripted step fails
Reactive: measures what real visitors experienced
- Needs real traffic before it reports anything
- Shows the variety of real devices, networks and locations
- Good for long-term trends across your whole audience
- Tells you about a problem after users have hit it
Synthetic monitoring FAQ
What is the difference between synthetic monitoring and uptime monitoring?
Uptime monitoring checks that a URL responds. Synthetic monitoring goes further: it runs complete user journeys in a real browser, such as signing in, searching and checking out, and checks the result and timing of every step.
Can I reuse my CloudQA regression tests for monitoring?
Yes. Synthetic monitoring uses journeys recorded with the same CloudQA Recorder, so a flow you already test before each release can also be scheduled to run against production.
How often can journeys run, and from where?
Journeys can run as often as every five minutes, in real Chrome and Firefox browsers, from multiple geographic locations.
How will my team be alerted?
Alerts can go to email, SMS, Slack and PagerDuty. Each alert links to step-level timings and screenshots, and you can schedule maintenance windows when monitoring pauses.
How do I get started?
Synthetic monitoring is set up with our team for CloudQA customers. Talk to us about the journeys that matter most to your business.
Learn more about synthetic monitoring
What is synthetic testing?
A plain-language introduction to synthetic testing and when to use it.
Monitor multi-step journeys
How to monitor complex user journeys without writing code.
Add synthetic monitoring to your key user journeys
Synthetic monitoring is set up with our team for CloudQA customers. Tell us which flows matter most and we will help you get them monitored.