Synthetic monitoring is an invaluable way to ensure websites or applications’ availability and user experience, such as new relics. By creating synthetic monitors in New Relic, you can detect issues quickly and rapidly solve them.
This article will guide you through setting up synthetics monitoring in New Relic to proactively track and monitor the availability and performance of your web application.
Table of Contents
Create a New Monitor
Synthetic monitoring allows you to proactively address performance issues, enhance user experience, and ensure the availability of your web application or website. By simulating various user interactions, synthetic monitoring can detect problems that would otherwise go undetected with traditional real-user monitoring – New Relic also offers tools and features designed to investigate and solve those problems quickly and efficiently.
To create a synthetic monitor in New Relic One, navigate to the Synthetics section of its user interface and click “Create a New Monitor.” Choose HTTP or scripted browser monitoring and follow the on-screen instructions to enter your target URL or endpoint for monitoring. In addition, choose whether Ping, Simple Browser, or API test is to be executed, as well as provide your monitor name, which must contain up to 30 characters that must be unique; these names cannot have HTML bracket entities like > without being encoded appropriately as “/ >.”
Once you’ve selected your settings and clicked “Save Monitor,” a summary of its current status and an indicator of whether it is active will appear on the screen. Once saved, your monitor will begin running at times you specify and gather information about how well your website or application is doing.
New Relic’s synthetic data collection from each test is aggregated and translated into metrics, providing invaluable information on how your applications and websites perform. You can use this information with New Relic’s infrastructure and APM tools to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues. In addition, alert conditions based on synthetic monitoring results notify you when specific requirements occur – including failures, response time thresholds, or content checks that trigger an awake state. New Relic integrates seamlessly with collaboration tools like Slack and Jira for seamless incident management capabilities.
Set Up Alerts
New Relic’s Alerts unified alerting tool allows you to manage alert policies and conditions across our monitoring products, including our synthetic monitoring capabilities to simulate user interactions to proactively detect performance issues in front-end applications or backend infrastructure from multiple geographical locations.
Navigating to the Synthetics section of your dashboard, where you’ll see an assortment of available monitors and some tips to get you started, is the first step toward setting up a new synthetic monitor. On the next page, click “Create new Monitor,” on the following page, set your monitor’s settings, including its name and frequency for checking. We suggest choosing an optimal frequency that balances monitoring your application with data ingestion costs.
On the next page, you can also customize your alerting options. Set alert thresholds, define which channels (email or Slack) to receive notifications through, and customize any other criteria that might apply for monitors needing alerting.
Once your monitor is saved, it will begin running at the times specified by you. If any issues arise, they’ll notify you with details about what they were and how to remedy them through the synthetics dashboard.
Create alerts directly from your dashboards to proactively track metrics that matter most, or integrate synthetic monitoring data with New Relic infrastructure and APM data for an easy way to correlate frontend and backend performance.
The new synthetic monitor overview experience lets you quickly view alert condition violations and open monitor incidents in one convenient view, eliminating the need to navigate between separate pages. While you can still access these pages if desired, we advise switching over as soon as possible so you’re always getting up-to-date information regarding the health status of your synthetic monitors.
Configure Thresholds
Once you’ve created synthetics monitors and configured alerts, New Relic will notify you via email or other methods if problems arise. You can customize which issues trigger an alert and set thresholds for how long checks should take to complete – this way, you’ll only be informed of actual issues impacting end-users without generating unnecessary false positives.
To configure alerts for a monitor, visit the Alerts section of the Synthetics dashboard and use the Add Monitor Alert button. After making a new monitor alert, choose from various issues you wish to be informed of, set monitoring frequency parameters, and specify multiple geographic regions from which your monitors should run – this allows for simulating user interactions across various locations.
Once activated, the monitor will run when you specify, gathering performance data on your website or application. After it has been completed, its results can be seen in the Synthetics Dashboard, where valuable insights about its availability and performance, such as how fast responses were, which checks were successful, which ones failed, logs of fallen reviews as well as screenshots, can help troubleshoot errors or failures more efficiently.
New Relic Synthetics is an invaluable monitoring solution that enables you to keep a constant watch over your website, application, or API. Through simulating user interactions and examining key metrics, New Relic Synthetics allows you to spot performance issues before they impact end-users and then use its other features, such as analytics, to gain insight and address them proactively. But remember that monitoring is not a one-time process–it requires constant attention and iteration!
Set Up Scripted Browser Monitoring
Synthetic monitoring provides automated scriptable tools to proactively track websites, critical business transactions, and API endpoints – an indispensable element of meeting service-level objectives (SLOs).
Step one of creating a synthetic monitor is selecting an appropriate monitor type. There are four varieties to consider: simple browser, ping, API test, and scripted browser monitors. Of these four, only a simple browser monitor uses pre-built scripts to navigate directly to websites and verify if certain elements exist on each page; all three require custom scripting that simulates actual user behaviors like searching or performing other specific actions on them.
After you’ve selected your monitor type, choose a name for it and configure settings such as how often and from where to run it. Consider both testing frequency and data ingestion costs when selecting a monitoring frequency. Tag your monitor by application or environment to simplify later retrieval.
Locator functions allow you to specify a search term that verifies that an element exists on a page, such as class, id, link text, name, or XPath. Utilizing Locators can help troubleshoot problems when pages don’t load or when an expected response code or content doesn’t return as expected.
While configuring, an optional script log can record each step of the monitor’s execution and may prove invaluable for diagnosing issues – such as when tests fail.
Ping monitors proactively ping websites or API endpoints, providing an easy way to test for availability and notify of expiring certificates. To use one, pair it with an alert that specifies your desired threshold thresholds so you’ll know when an email alert has been generated.
