Synthetic app

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.

Monitors 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 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 preview

In the Synthetic app, to display the preview panel for a monitor, select the monitor's name in the Monitor name column of the Synthetic monitors page.

The preview panel shows:

Use the controls in the upper-right corner of the preview panel to:

Filters

Filters allowing multiple selections help you find the monitors you're looking for. You can also save frequently used filters. Expand or collapse 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) allow you to search for monitors.

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 default to be applied each time you go to the Synthetic app.

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

Filter bar

The filter bar 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.

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

Create monitors

To create a monitor:

Reporting

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

The total monitoring time is divided into minute-level data points. All data points count as executions, although they don't necessarily coincide with actual executions.

On the screen below, the blue data points coincide with actual executions, and the white data points don't.

For example, if a monitor is set to execute tests every five minutes, every fifth data point (blue) coincides with an actual execution. All data points following the first failed ("down") execution and preceding the first successful ("up") execution count as "down." Thus, the total downtime is calculated as follows:

Total downtime = the first actual down execution + all following down data points.