Synthetic Monitoring

Gain deep insights into your applications’ user experience, across locations and browsers. Create synthetic tests for any application or service with the Checkmk Synthetic Monitoring add-on.

Synthethic Monitoring dashboard in Checkmk

Understand your end user’s problems

Simulate end user behavior with custom synthetic tests, exposing problems not visible on the IT infrastructure.

Ensure your application actually works

Monitor not just availability and performance of your applications, but also functionality, from anywhere, with any device.

Monitor any application

Test any application, from modern web apps to on-premises Windows applications and cover even special use cases.

One lens for application and infrastructure monitoring

Providing a great user experience is key to the successful delivery of services and products. Monitor critical user journeys to prevent friction, roadblocks, and user frustration. 

Synthethic monitoring illustration
  • Achieve high availability of applications by exposing problems not visible on the infrastructure side
  • Gain insight into the user experience, from the user’s perspective 
  • Go beyond availability and performance monitoring: test actual functionalities
  • Enable functionality testing from multiple locations and user clients
  • Manage SLAs and SLOs
  • Proactively monitor end-to-end user flows with browser tests

Full flexibility to monitor any application in any way

The Checkmk Synthetic Monitoring add-on allows you to create hundreds of diverse synthetic tests. Gain access to a wide range of potential use cases. 

  • Monitor any client on any platform
  • Proactively detect even minimal performance deviations
  • Test UIs on any browser, any mobile device, and any operating system
  • Test any application: from native Windows applications to modern web apps
  • Keyword libraries for any use case: databases, REST APIs, native apps – you name it
  • Cover any special use case: write your own libraries in Python
  • Get granular insights, thanks to pattern-based monitoring of runtimes
The dashboard for Checkmk Synthethic Monitoring

Simple but powerful

Checkmk Synthetic Monitoring allows non-developers to write simple low-code abstracted tests. This makes it easy to cover special or complex use cases.

Synthetic Monitoring View in Checkmk
  • 100% compatibility with Robot Framework, the leading test automation system – no need to adapt existing tests
  • High level of abstraction simplify test design and maintenance
  • Powerful rule-based configuration
  • Automated re-execution of failed tests
  • Test results are easy to read: even screenshots and screen recordings can be embedded in logs, for instant clarity
  • Visualize user flows through clear, step-by-step screenshots

Fully integrated into the Checkmk platform

Synthetic Monitoring is fully integrated into the Checkmk platform, providing a seamless configuration and monitoring experience for the monitoring user.

  • Leverage Checkmk's built-in deployment mechanisms
  • Visualize results in Checkmk's standard monitoring views and dashboards
  • Configure your alerting using Checkmk's built-in fine granular alerting functionality
  • Leverage your existing defined notifications to notify the responsible teams
  • Overall, make Synthetic Monitoring an integral part of your infrastructure & application monitoring
View of Synthethic Monitoring tests in Checkmk

FAQ

Real user monitoring (RUM) is based on real user data behavior, collecting metrics that come from active systems, with real usage data. Synthetic monitoring simulates these data by using synthetic tests through scripts that mimic what real users would do.

The Robot Framework is an open source automation framework. Supported by the Robot Framework Foundation, it is open and extensible, with a huge community. It is mainly used for robotic process automation (RPA) and test automation, which is the use case that the Synthetic Monitoring add-on in Checkmk implements.

The open-source tool RCC is used by Robotmk to automatically build customised execution environments on the test clients in which the robot framework tests can run in isolation from each other. This reduces the administrative effort enormously. 

Ready to start your synthetic monitoring journey?

Download Checkmk 2.3 and get 3 free tests.