Synthetic App

Latest Dynatrace

With Synthetic (new) Synthetic you can create and manage synthetic monitors.

Synthetic monitors

The synthetic monitors page is the landing page of the Synthetic app and is the control center for your synthetic monitors. By default, the page displays all monitors in your environment, active or inactive, in a table with key availability and performance results, so you can check the health of your monitors at a glance. Powerful and flexible filters enable you to narrow your search for synthetic monitors.

To find out how to create a new monitor, see Create monitors.

Monitor table

By default, monitors with open problems (issues) are displayed alphabetically at the top of the table. Next, enabled monitors with no problems are displayed alphabetically, followed last by disabled monitors displayed alphabetically.

You can hide and sort columns in ascending or descending order. Select Columns in the top-right corner of the table to select which columns to display or hide.

Pagination controls at the bottom of the monitor table allow you to specify the number of rows per page and to move through the monitor table from page to page.

The columns display the following information for each monitor.

  • Monitor name—Select to view a quick overview of the monitor to the right of the Synthetic monitors page
  • Created—monitor creation date and time
  • Last modified—ID of the user who last edited the monitor and the date and time of modification
  • ID - full monitor identifier
  • Last execution—date and time of the most recent execution from any location
  • Type—monitor type, for example, HTTP
  • Frequency—execution frequency or On demand, as specified in the monitor configuration
  • Availability—average availability during the selected timeframe
  • Duration—average performance during the selected timeframe in seconds

Filters

Filters that allow for multiple selections help you find the monitors you're looking for. You can also save frequently used filters. Expand Open Dashboards panel or collapse Close Dashboards panel the filters to focus on search or results, as required. The filters are automatically collapsed when viewing the quick overview for a monitor.

The following filter categories (each with multiple options) enable you to search for monitors.

  • Type—monitor type
  • Ongoing issues—monitors with and without availability or performance problems
  • Frontend application—associated RUM application
  • Status–whether monitors are active or inactive (disabled)
  • Locations–public and private monitoring locations
  • Device profile—for example, desktop, Apple iPhone 8
  • Last editor–ID of the user who last edited a monitor
  • Tags—values or key-value pairs applied to monitors; you can choose tags to include or exclude from your search.
  • Edited during the timeframe—monitors that were or were not edited during the selected global timeframe
  • ISP / Cloud provider—of public Synthetic locations
  • Frequency—monitoring frequency

How filters work

Within each category, you can select multiple filters. For example, when selecting monitors by Type, you can opt to view HTTP as well as DNS monitors. Within a category, filters are applied using the OR logic—monitors matching any selection are displayed.

The filter options shown in most categories depend on your monitors; only those filters relevant to your monitors are available. For example, if you have no HTTP monitors, you won't see the HTTP option to filter by.

The number of monitors matching each filter is displayed. For example, the list of Locations shows the number of monitors per location. This number is dynamically adjusted based on your filter selections in other categories.

You can select filters in multiple categories. Filter categories are applied using the AND logic. For example, if you select all Network availability monitors (DNS, ICMP, and TCP) and two tags, IP, and host-group, the resulting list contains network availability monitors with either the IP or the host-group tags.

Filter sets

You can save combinations of filters as named filter sets for quick access to frequently used search criteria—select Save new filter and provide a filter name. You can set one filter set as the default that's applied each time you go to the Synthetic app.

Select More More actions next to a filter set for additional actions such as: Set as default, Rename, Duplicate, or Delete.

Filter bar

The filter bar Variable at the top of the page displays a fixed filter for searching by monitor name: select Filter by name and enter your search string. Any additional filters or filter sets you apply are displayed in the filter bar, from which you can clear applied filters.

Create monitors

In the Create monitor section, you can choose the type of synthetic monitor that you want to create.

There are three types of monitors:

Reporting

For each monitor type, you can display a reporting page. See

Private locations

The goal of private locations is to execute synthetic tests. For applications and endpoints within corporate networks, which are not available from the public internet, you need to use private locations. Also, private locations are obligatory for executing NAM tests.

You can create only classic locations using private locations for now. However, the locations list displays both classic and containerized (for example, Kubernetes and OpenShift) locations.

The Private locations tab of Synthetic (new) Synthetic shows the list of all private locations available within a given environment. For each private location, there's information about how many synthetic monitors are assigned, with necessary links to those monitors.

Create a private location

To add a classic private location

  1. Go to Private locations tab in the upper-left of the Synthetic (new) Synthetic home page.

  2. Select Private locations > Classic.

  3. Give your location a name, for example, Boston office, 3rd floor.

  4. Map it from an existing geographic location or add a custom location defined by Country, Region, City, Latitude and Longitude.

  5. Add a Synthetic-enabled Existing ActiveGate to the location or Deploy new ActiveGate (adding a new ActiveGate will redirect you to Discovery & Coverage Discovery & Coverage).

    Note that an ActiveGate can only be assigned to a single location.

  6. optional Turn on Enable Chromium auto-update—it will be triggered during Synthetic engine updates at this location.

    You can Enable Chromium auto-update at the location level, that is, for all ActiveGates assigned to a private location. This setting only applies to Linux-based ActiveGates; on Windows-based ActiveGates, Chromium is always updated during Synthetic engine updates.

    As we recommend using the latest supported Chromium version for the smooth and secure execution of browser monitors from your private location, Chromium autoupdate is turned on by default for locations with Linux-based ActiveGates. If your location has only Windows-based ActiveGates, the toggle is turned on but grayed out; Chromium is always updated automatically on Windows-based ActiveGates.

    Chromium autoupdate takes place during manual as well as automatic ActiveGate and Synthetic engine updates. If you don't want Chromium to be updated automatically, for example, to use a specific version of Chromium, or if you have offline environments, turn off the switch before triggering an ActiveGate update.

    Successful Chromium autoupdate requires access to repositories for Chromium and dependencies at https://synthetic-packages.s3.amazonaws.com. (If you've enabled a custom local repository, Chromium components (but not dependencies) need to be available at the specified HTTP server address. See Chromium autoupdate from a custom repository below.)

    You will see a message if Chromium autoupdate fails for this or other reasons—we recommend either meeting the requirements for autoupdate (such as access to repositories) or disabling Chromium autoupdate for your private location.

    If you disable Chromium autoupdate, you can manually update Chromium per ActiveGate. However, Chromium autoupdate is required when using custom repositories.

    Also, check our information on installing Chromium and other dependencies manually (Linux only).

Chromium autoupdate takes place during manual as well as automatic ActiveGate and Synthetic engine updates. If you don't want Chromium to be updated automatically, for example, to use a specific version of Chromium, or if you have offline environments, turn off the switch before triggering an ActiveGate update.

  1. optional If you have outage issues with your private location, use the Location outage handling options to receive related notifications. See the on-screen instructions for details.

  2. Select Save.

Edit a private location

To edit an existing private location

  1. Go to Private locations tab to Private Synthetic locations home page.
  2. Select the location name to display the panel on the right.
  3. In the displayed panel, edit the settings.