Monitoring Synthetic Web Traffic will Save You from... Wait, what?

Trust me, it will. First, let's define synthetic traffic. Synthetic website traffic is traffic that is generated by a computer program to simulate real users and their experiences from various locations. Enough said.

Now, why would you want synthetic traffic in the first place? Well, you could use the inflated number of hits to your website to brag to your friends, but I suspect you haven't gotten this far in life by pursuing such vapid endeavors. A more realistic scenario would be the following:

Let's say you're the Admin for a chain of nationwide banks. Most of your customers are under 60, have little fear of technology, and actually use the online banking feature you've painstakingly implemented. Your main fear would be that Nick Newbie comes along and discovers something is broken when he tries to perform a certain transaction, prompting the dreaded phone call from the bemused user, and possibly your boss. Brace yourself for a talking to and a little overtime.

With synthetic traffic, you can find and fix web performance issues, by a web performance monitoring tool before they impact your users. You can have fake users all over the world performing a host of transactions. If something goes awry, you'll know when, where, and why, instantly. No angry user on the phone, the boss remains aloof, and you are stress free because you get out of the office on time. Just fix the problem at your leisure. That's what you're good at anyway, all Thanks to your web application monitoring.

The bottom line is that synthetic traffic simulates real activity by real users. Failures can include people making mistakes, network bottlenecks, connectivity failures, and so on. Know about the failures before your users and bosses do with effecient website monitoring. Save yourself the headache and aggravation. Don't be this guy:

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