The Importance of Real and Synthetic End User Monitoring

Dennis Rietvink

Organizations have many ways of ensuring that their systems are functioning properly. One of the most important things to measure, when assessing the performance of a system, is the end user experience.

Can users access the system quickly? Do they experience errors while accessing the system? Can they easily interact with the system across all the available channels? For the IT department, the answers to these questions determine whether or not the system is functioning properly. For the organization, they reveal the most important thing – whether or not their customers are happy, and are likely to continue using their services.

There are two ways to monitor user transactions and interactions with your website:

Real User Monitoring

This method uses a passive monitoring system, documenting all actions of users as they interact with your website. The feedback, generated in real time, is automatically assessed against established benchmarks, to correctly measure the quality of delivered services.

Real user monitoring systems have many advantages – you get to know exactly how visitors to your website experience all its features and applications, and how the website is performing for your end users in various geographic locations. The biggest problem with this method is that you won’t know about any website issues until at least one user gets to experience an existing problem.

Synthetic User Monitoring

This method simulates user experience on your website. It works by scripting typical user actions, and then simulates user click at regular intervals, to ensure that your website is responsive.

This method enables you to proactively catch any existing problems before your end users get to experience slow or unresponsive applications, or encounter other errors.

The obvious downside is that this method requires you to spend time scripting typical user actions. In addition, if your website changes frequently, you’ll need to periodically update your scripted scenarios.

In addition to websites, synthetic transactions can be used to monitor databases and TCP ports.

Organizations need a solution that can help recognize potential system problems by categorizing and visually presenting information concerning end user behavior and website performance in real time. In addition, such solution should also offer a way to script common user transactions and monitor the system’s performance 24x7.

End user monitoring reflects end user health, but doesn’t tell you the root cause of a problem. Linking end user monitoring data with application and infrastructure monitoring data enables organizations to determine the impact of a problem, rank its priority and quickly navigate to the root cause.

Dennis Rietvink is Co-Founder and VP of Product Management at Savision

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The Importance of Real and Synthetic End User Monitoring

Dennis Rietvink

Organizations have many ways of ensuring that their systems are functioning properly. One of the most important things to measure, when assessing the performance of a system, is the end user experience.

Can users access the system quickly? Do they experience errors while accessing the system? Can they easily interact with the system across all the available channels? For the IT department, the answers to these questions determine whether or not the system is functioning properly. For the organization, they reveal the most important thing – whether or not their customers are happy, and are likely to continue using their services.

There are two ways to monitor user transactions and interactions with your website:

Real User Monitoring

This method uses a passive monitoring system, documenting all actions of users as they interact with your website. The feedback, generated in real time, is automatically assessed against established benchmarks, to correctly measure the quality of delivered services.

Real user monitoring systems have many advantages – you get to know exactly how visitors to your website experience all its features and applications, and how the website is performing for your end users in various geographic locations. The biggest problem with this method is that you won’t know about any website issues until at least one user gets to experience an existing problem.

Synthetic User Monitoring

This method simulates user experience on your website. It works by scripting typical user actions, and then simulates user click at regular intervals, to ensure that your website is responsive.

This method enables you to proactively catch any existing problems before your end users get to experience slow or unresponsive applications, or encounter other errors.

The obvious downside is that this method requires you to spend time scripting typical user actions. In addition, if your website changes frequently, you’ll need to periodically update your scripted scenarios.

In addition to websites, synthetic transactions can be used to monitor databases and TCP ports.

Organizations need a solution that can help recognize potential system problems by categorizing and visually presenting information concerning end user behavior and website performance in real time. In addition, such solution should also offer a way to script common user transactions and monitor the system’s performance 24x7.

End user monitoring reflects end user health, but doesn’t tell you the root cause of a problem. Linking end user monitoring data with application and infrastructure monitoring data enables organizations to determine the impact of a problem, rank its priority and quickly navigate to the root cause.

Dennis Rietvink is Co-Founder and VP of Product Management at Savision

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The Quiet Power of Milliseconds in High Traffic Systems

One of the earliest lessons I learned from architecting throughput-heavy services is that simplicity wins repeatedly: fewer moving parts, loosely coupled execution (fewer synchronous calls), and precise timing metering. You want data and decisions to travel the shortest possible path. The goal is to build a system where every strategy and each line of code (contention is the key metric) complements the decision trees ...

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The numbers back this urgency up. A recent Zapier survey shows that 92% of enterprises now treat AI as a top priority. Leaders want it, and teams are clamoring for it. But if you look closer at the operations of these companies, you see a different picture. The rollout is slow. The results are often delayed. There's a disconnect between what leaders want and what their technical infrastructure can handle ...

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Kyndryl's 2025 Readiness Report revealed that 61% of global business and technology leaders report increasing pressure from boards and regulators to prove AI's ROI. As the technology evolves and expectations continue to rise, leaders are compelled to generate and prove impact before scaling further. This will lead to a decisive turning point in 2026 ...

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Cloudflare's disruption illustrates how quickly a single provider's issue cascades into widespread exposure. Many organizations don't fully realize how tightly their systems are coupled to thirdparty services, or how quickly availability and security concerns align when those services falter ... You can't avoid these dependencies, but you can understand them ...

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Basic uptime is no longer the gold standard. By 2026, network monitoring must do more than report status, it must explain performance in a hybrid-first world. Networks are no longer just static support systems; they are agile, distributed architectures that sit at the very heart of the customer experience and the business outcomes ... The following five trends represent the new standard for network health, providing a blueprint for teams to move from reactive troubleshooting to a proactive, integrated future ...

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