Synthetic monitoring is about proactively simulating user visits, regardless of whether or not real users are currently visiting your site. Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring provides you with 24x7 global visibility into your applications. An HTTP monitor uses simple HTTP requests. A browser monitor involves much more—it drives real web browser sessions with full HTML5/AJAX support.
Dynatrace offers these types of synthetic monitors: single-URL browser monitors, browser clickpaths, HTTP monitors and NAM monitors.
A single-URL browser monitor is the equivalent of a simulated user visiting your application using a modern, updated web browser. Browser monitors can be configured to run from any of our global public or private locations at frequencies of up to every five minutes. Browser monitors alert you when your application becomes inaccessible or when baseline performance degrades significantly.
Browser clickpaths are simulated user visits that monitor your application’s business-critical workflows. You can use the Dynatrace recorder (or you can use script mode) to capture an exact sequence of clicks and user input that you're interested in monitoring for availability and performance. Once you’ve captured the mouse clicks and additional user actions that you want your browser clickpath to include, you can schedule the browser clickpath to run automatically at regular intervals from our global public or private locations to test your site’s availability and performance.
HTTP monitors comprise simple HTTP requests. You can use them to monitor the availability of your API endpoints or perform simple HTTP checks for single-resource availability. You can also set up performance thresholds for HTTP monitors. As with browser monitors, HTTP monitors run automatically at regular intervals from our global public or private locations.
HTTP monitors executed by an ActiveGate from a private Synthetic location can be used to check the availability of your internal resources that are inaccessible from outside your network. Note that on private locations, capacity usage is tracked separately for a subtype, high-resource HTTP monitors. These monitors have special resource-intensive features such as pre- or post-execution scripts, OAuth2 authorization, or Kerberos authentication.
Dynatrace version 1.296+
Network availability monitoring (NAM) allows you to monitor the availability of remote hosts or services over the network when an HTTP/HTTPS endpoint isn't available.
NAM enables you to create synthetic network availability monitors of the following types:
NAM monitors only work with private locations. To learn more about private locations, see Private Synthetic locations.
The supported browser for the Dynatrace Synthetic Recorder is Google Chrome (latest version, backwards compatible).
The browser used for executing browser monitors from public locations is listed on the Frequency and locations page when you create or edit a browser monitor.
See Browser monitors in private locations for Chromium versions you should install on a Synthetic-enabled ActiveGate running private browser monitors.
To enhance synthetic monitor security, Dynatrace blocks monitors from sending requests to a local host (for example, localhost or 127.0.0.1).
Additionally, you can read about credential vault security architecture for synthetic monitoring credentials.