Real User or Synthetic Monitoring?

About this interactive

Servers can look healthy while customers still wait. The lesson's answer is to monitor from the user's side too. Real user monitoring (RUM) puts a little code in the web page. When a real person visits, that code runs in their browser and reports back how long things took for them. You see what actual people on actual devices and connections get, but only when someone is using the site. Synthetic monitoring runs a scripted visit instead: a test account logs in, goes to one part of the application and times each step, on a schedule such as every five minutes. Because the steps never change, the numbers compare cleanly over time, and they keep coming at 3 a.m. or before a feature launches, when no real visitor is there. The lesson also mentions uptime monitoring, an outside check that the site answers at all. It is the simplest outside test and tells you less than either of these.

What you'll learn

Tell real user monitoring, which measures what actual visitors experience from their own browsers, from synthetic monitoring, which runs the same scripted visit on a schedule
Explain why synthetic monitoring gives consistent measurements even when nobody is using the application, and why real user monitoring shows what real people on real devices get

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

4.4 Explain security alerting and monitoring concepts and tools.

NIST CSF

DE.CM-06 External service provider activities and services are monitored to find potentially adverse events.

NIST 800-53

SI-4 System Monitoring

Key terms

Real User Monitoring: A monitoring method that captures performance and interaction data from actual users as they use an application in real time.
Synthetic Monitoring: A monitoring method that uses scripted, automated transactions to simulate user interactions and consistently measure application performance over time.
End-User Experience Monitoring: The practice of measuring and analyzing the performance and usability of an application from the perspective of the end user.
Uptime Monitoring: A monitoring method that checks whether a system or web application is accessible and responding, measuring its availability.

Topics

Monitoring User Experience Interactive Streak Sort

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