A comprehensive guide to synthetic testing

Imagine launching a new e-commerce feature in a high-traffic region. Relying solely on real user traffic to gauge performance can be risky.

Synthetic testing allows you to proactively simulate user behavior, identify bottlenecks, and ensure a smooth experience for your customers before they even arrive. Synthetic testing provides valuable insights into your digital landscape, enabling you to anticipate and address potential issues proactively.

What is synthetic testing?

Synthetic testing is a proactive monitoring technique that simulates real user behavior to identify performance issues in applications and services. It involves creating scripts that mimic user actions and then executing these scripts from various locations worldwide. By monitoring response times and other performance metrics, synthetic testing can help organizations proactively identify and address potential problems before they impact real users.

How synthetic testing works

A synthetic testing tool:

• Records business-critical transactions and mimics real user interactions, such as clicking buttons, entering data, and navigating the application.
• Executes scripts from various locations around the world, simulating user behavior from different perspectives.
• Gauges the critical metrics or the key performance indicators.
• Triggers alerts when performance metrics fall below predefined thresholds, anomalies are detected, or the functionalities gets broken.

Use cases of synthetic testing

E-commerce

E-commerce businesses can employ synthetic testing to simulate customer journeys and identify potential bottlenecks in the checkout process. By creating scripts that mimic real user actions, such as adding items to the cart, entering payment information, and completing a purchase, businesses can use synthetic testing to identify issues that may lead to abandoned carts. This allows them to optimize the checkout process, reduce friction, and increase conversion rates.

Banking

Synthetic testing is a valuable tool for banks to ensure the reliability and performance of critical services. By simulating user interactions, banks can verify the security and speed of login processes, test funds transfers and payments, and evaluate mobile banking apps. This helps them improve customer satisfaction, reduce downtime, enhance security, comply with regulations, and optimize costs.

Gaming

Synthetic testing is a valuable tool for online game developers to ensure a seamless user experience. By simulating player interactions and measuring performance metrics, developers can identify and address issues, optimize gameplay, prevent downtime, and maintain a competitive edge.

Synthetic testing vs. real user monitoring: A comparison

Synthetic testing and real user monitoring (RUM) are both valuable tools for assessing web application performance, but they offer distinct perspectives:

Combining synthetic testing and RUM

For a comprehensive view of your web application's performance, consider using both synthetic testing and RUM. Synthetic testing helps you identify potential issues proactively, while RUM provides insights into how real users are experiencing your application. By leveraging both synthetic testing and RUM, you can gain a deeper understanding of your web application's performance and make data-driven decisions to improve the user experience.

Synthetic testing is your proactive defense against digital disruptions. By anticipating potential issues and addressing them before they impact real users, you can ensure a seamless, reliable experience. With Site24x7’s comprehensive synthetic testing solution, you can create custom scripts, simulate various user scenarios to test specific aspects of your application from multiple locations worldwide, identify issues as they occur, gain insights into trends and bottlenecks, get notified of critical issues, and offer a smooth end-user experience.