Synthetic Monitoring
Synthetic monitoring runs scripted, simulated user transactions against a live production system on a regular schedule — logging in, searching, checking out — proactively detecting outages or performance degradation before real users report them, rather than waiting for actual user complaints.
Unlike real user monitoring, which only observes what actual traffic happens to do, synthetic monitoring runs the same defined checks continuously regardless of real traffic patterns — meaning it can catch a broken checkout flow at 3am when almost no real users are active to notice or report it themselves.
It's effectively automated smoke testing running permanently against production, on a schedule (every few minutes) rather than triggered by a deploy — the same core test-writing skill applies, just aimed at continuous production health rather than a one-time pre-release gate.
