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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 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

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...