Nowadays, downtimes of business applications result in a loss of revenue because a user order cannot be placed, and this user may not return to the future. Uptime has now become a major concern of business and IT departments.
Based on my experience, manual monitoring of application availability, accuracy, and performance is very time-consuming and too expensive. A much better approach is to identify some critical use cases within the affected applications, automate those and execute them regularly at the required business locations.
This so-called synthetic monitoring allows you to identify downtimes prior to they are affecting the end user. In addition, performance, accuracy, and availability metrics could be permanently collected and used to raise a ticket if certain thresholds were violated.
The flip side of synthetic monitoring is that a change in an application under monitoring could result in false alerts. To avoid such situations, you should make synthetic monitoring part of your development chain and test your synthetic scripts also during acceptance test of your business applications.
Why do we need synthetic monitoring and how should we integrate it into our software development chain?