10 Best Synthetic Monitoring Tools And Services [2024 Review]

Here we will compare and explore the top Synthetic Monitoring Tools and Services to guide you to select the best Synthetic Monitoring Tool for your business needs:

Synthetic Monitoring tools or services are the solutions offered for verifying the performance, availability, reachability, and reliability of a website or application at any time.

All these factors are verified by simulating user engagement. It helps with identifying and resolving the issues before your end-users will get to know about them.

Synthetic Monitoring Overview

Synthetic Monitoring Tools are useful for various reasons such as benchmarking & baselining, getting ready for heavy traffic, monitoring complex transactions & business processes, measuring & adhering to SLAs, etc.

They support different types of monitoring such as User Journey Transaction Testing, HTTP Monitoring, Mobile Simulation, SaaS Monitoring, API Monitor, FTP Monitoring, etc.

The statistics mentioned in the below image tell us the importance of Synthetic Monitoring tools and services.

[image source]

Significance Of Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic Monitoring Tools and Services helps with the proactive monitoring of user experience and simplifies the synthetic monitoring. Critical business transactions and user journeys will get monitored by these tools.

Following is the list of benefits that businesses will get by the use of these tools:

• Businesses will be able to do the proactive monitoring of endpoints with API tests.
• You will get insights on global performance and endpoint availability.
• Fast root cause analysis.
• These tools and services will let you troubleshoot performance issues before your customers will get to know about them.
• Tools like Datadog offer a web recorder that will let you build browser tests without coding.

List of Top Synthetic Monitoring Tools and Services

Here is the list of popular Synthetic Monitoring tools:

1. ManageEngine Applications Manager
2. AlertBot
3. Sematext
4. Uptrends
5. SmartBear AlertSite
6. Dynatrace
7. AppDynamics
8. Site24*7
9. New Relic
10. EG Innovations
11. SolarWinds Pingdom
12. Dotcom-Monitor
13. Datadog HQ

Comparison of Best Synthetic Monitoring Solutions

Tools & Services	Our Ratings	Best for	Features	Free Trial	Price
ManageEngine Applications Manager		Testing real user experience on the website 24/7 and gathering insight from multiple locations.	Deploy EUM agents globally, Selenium-based scripting, web transaction recorder	Available	Free forever with limited capabilities. Starts at $395/year.
AlertBot		Monitoring of web pages and applications around the world.	Web Recorder, Real Browser Monitoring, Waterfall Reporting, etc.	Available for 14 days.	Request a quote.
Sematext Synthetics		IT system monitoring tools for DevOps.	Uptime & API Monitoring, SSL Certificate Monitoring, etc.	Available for 14 days	It starts at $2 per monitor.
Uptrends		Web performance and website monitoring.	Failure snapshots, bandwidth throttling, precise diagrams, etc.	Available for 30 days.	It starts at $15.47 per month
SmartBear AlertSite		Monitoring of websites from all over the globe & in private networks.	Unified view of UI & API performance, 350+ global nodes, etc.	Available	Get a quote.

Let us review the listed tools and services in detail.

#1) ManageEngine Applications Manager

Best for testing real user experience on the website 24/7 and gathering insight from multiple locations.

With Applications Manager, ManageEngine wins you with an all-in-one monitoring tool exceptional at synthetic monitoring. Once launched, this tool will serve as a virtual user that meticulously traverses through the depth of your website and application to mimic real-life user experiences. 

The tool’s ability to proactively simulate real user experience makes it capable of effectively identifying any issues plaguing your website or application. The tool can be precise when replicating user journeys, thanks to its use of automated scripts.

You can leverage Application Manager to deploy End User Monitoring Agents worldwide who will help you gain insights on performance from anywhere. You are guaranteed comprehensive insight into your URL sequences. The tool further streamlines the process of synthetic monitoring via data-driven application analytics. 

Features:

• Precisely replicate user journeys on websites and applications to assess their performance. 
• Deploy End User Monitoring agents to gather insight into performance from multiple geographical locations. 
• Get in-depth insights on critical metrics like DNS resolution times, page size analysis, page response time, etc. 
• Get greater visibility into your digital infrastructure with a special focus on components like email servers, web servers, REST APIs, etc. 
• Comes equipped with an impressive fault management system that can accurately pinpoint the root cause of any error or issue. 

Verdict: ManageEngine’s Application Manager is a tool that I’d recommend to IT and DevOps teams who would like to streamline their synthetic monitoring efforts. This is an excellent software that you can use to rectify performance issues related to your website or application in a cost-effective manner while boosting user satisfaction. 

Price: You can monitor up to 5 apps and servers with Applications Manager for free. The professional plan starts at $395/year whereas the enterprise plan starts at $9595/year. You can contact the ManageEngine team for a custom quote. A free trial and demo of the tool are also provided upon request.

#2) AlertBot

AlertBot is among the top players in the synthetic monitoring industry and is ideal for organizations of all sizes. They use real web browsers to do all their performance testing and help identify problem areas and bottlenecks on your site to improve the users’ experience.

AlertBot excels at offering advanced features that are very easy and intuitive to use, personally assisting customers with web transaction monitoring setup, and providing detailed email reports that clearly pinpoint website problems so you can take action quickly.

Features:

• The interface is simple and intuitive, which makes it easy to set up and monitor advanced websites and web applications.
• AlertBot lets you set up multi-step transaction monitoring using the AlertBot Web Recorder, allowing you to simulate actual processes on your site using real browsers such as login processes, form submissions, shopping carts, etc.
• Identify bottlenecks, pinpoint problems, and reduce downtime, giving users a better web experience.
• Receive alerts to you or your team anytime your website is slow or down with text, email, or phone call alerts.
• AlertBot’s team is working alongside you to make sure all your pages and recorded experiences are always running smoothly.
• Monitor your web pages from locations around the world, giving you widespread coverage.

Verdict: AlertBot is a great solution for businesses of all sizes. They offer cutting-edge features delivered through a simple UI making it powerful and easy to use. Their Proactive ScriptAssist option is a nice benefit to make sure your recorded experience is always running smoothly.

They also have a great Health Map report that was emailed to me daily providing crucial at-a-glance performance metrics about my sites and processes.

Price: Pricing is structured by Annual or Monthly terms with three popular plans on their site. Annual plans get an extra 10-20% off the monthly rates. They also offer Custom Plans for more specialized needs and can provide you with a quote.

Pricing is determined by several factors like monitor type, quantity, locations, and frequency of tests. They also offer a free 14-day trial period.

#3) Sematext

Best for IT system monitoring tools for DevOps.

Sematext offers products for logs, monitoring, experience, and synthetics. Sematext Synthetics will help you with fast delivering reliable & consistent websites and APIs. It has synthetic monitoring and testing tools for monitoring the availability of a website, business-critical transactions, and APIs.

Features:

• Sematext can perform uptime and API monitoring from multiple locations, private networks, behind firewalls, etc.
• It can track network timings across all layers (DNS, TCP, SSL, & HTTP).
• For Website Performance Monitoring, it can measure page load time, track core web vitals & third-party performance & SLAs, and diagnose web performance issues, etc.
• It has various functionalities such as SSL Certificate monitoring and end-to-end visibility.

Verdict: Sematext Synthetics platform can diagnose website performance issues and will help you with preventing them. It has capabilities for Uptime & API monitoring, Website Performance Monitoring, SSL Certificate Monitoring, and End-to-end visibility.

Price: The price for Sematext Synthetics starts at $2 per monitor. Other pricing plans are Logs (starts at $50 per month), Monitoring (starts at $0.007 per hour), and Experience (starts at $9 per month). A free trial is available for 14 days.

#4) Uptrends

Best for web performance and website monitoring.

Uptrends Synthetic Monitoring platform will let you run automated tests to evaluate the performance of the website. Web browser emulation is used for simulating the user actions. Uptrends will help you to improve uptime and enhance site performance. It can perform a full-page check and provide a waterfall report. It has various capabilities for website and web application monitoring.

Features:

• Uptrends has functionalities for building data transfer with concurrent monitoring. It can perform concurrent monitoring for three or more locations.
• Uptrends capture the detailed performance data after testing the page.
• It provides waterfall reports that will help you with identifying the causes of the slowdown.
• It provides the facility of inspecting HTTP headers for an element-by-element basis.
• It has capabilities for testing the core functions of a website such as a shopping cart and payment screen.

Verdict: Uptrends performs the synthetic monitoring of the website by communicating with it. It has 225 checkpoint servers. It helps in optimizing the performance. It offers plans for small to large businesses. Uptrends is a platform with the power of uptime monitoring, real user monitoring, internal server monitoring, public status page, and alert escalation.

Price: Uptrends has three pricing plans, Starter (Starts at $15.47 per month), Business (starts at $21.59 per month), Enterprise (starts at $51.58 per month). It offers a free trial of 30 days.

#5) SmartBear AlertSite

Best for monitoring of websites, web apps, APIs from all over the globe & in private networks.

SmartBear AlertSite offers Synthetic Monitoring tools that will give you a unified view of UI and API performance. It has more than 350 global nodes and private network monitoring coverage. It can be integrated with Ops and DevOps tool stacks. It will be easier to create Web and API monitors.

AlertSite offers solutions for Web Monitoring, API Monitoring, SLA Monitoring, Application Monitoring, Mobile Monitoring, Cloud Monitoring, etc.

Features:

• AlertSite will let you reuse the test cases like Selenium Scripts for creating the new monitors.
• DejaClick is the point-and-click web recorder that will let you add new monitors without coding.
• You will be able to add API monitors with the help of the API Endpoint URL or OpenAPI Specification file.

Verdict: AlertSite can perform the monitoring of UI and API layers for functionality, availability, performance, etc. With this tool, creating monitors is intuitive & effortless. It will give you the root cause of the performance deviation.

Price: AlertSite offers a free trial for the tools. It has plans for Internal Monitoring, External Monitoring, and Hybrid Deployment. You can get a quote for pricing details. The price will be based on various factors such as the monitor type & quantity, monitor locations, frequency of runs, etc.

#6) Dynatrace

Best for digital experience monitoring.

Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring solution will provide insights on your service levels and the availability of a system & key transactions. It offers a web-based recorder to record business-critical transactions. It will let you playback the scripted transactions. Dynatrace supports various integrations such as Slack, VictorOps, PagerDuty, etc.

You will be able to compare the application’s performance from an end-user perspective.

For simulating the user actions, Dynatrace makes use of all popular desktop and mobile browsers. It can simulate the user journey from various locations around the world.

Features:

• Dynatrace provides features for monitoring critical workflows without scripting.
• It provides a facility to playback scripted transactions that have all the screen, keyboard, and mouse interactions simulating the real user.
• You can run the captured business transactions in real browsers.
• It has a facility to benchmark the performance of the site against the competition’s key pages as well as transactions in real-time.

Verdict: Dynatrace synthetic monitoring will provide facilities of SLA monitoring, management of CDN & 3rd party performance, and simulating business-critical customer journeys. It will help you with proactive problem analysis. It offers solutions for RUM, Synthetic Monitoring, and session replay.

Price: You can try the platform for free. Dynatrace offers three pricing plans, Full-stack monitoring (starts at $69 per month per 8GB host), Infrastructure Monitoring ($21 per month per 8GB host), and Digital Experience Monitoring ($11 per month for 10K digital experience monitoring units). All these prices are for annual billing.

#7) AppDynamics

Best for intelligent cloud agents for monitoring business transactions & performance.

AppDynamics provides the Browser Synthetic Monitoring tools to monitor the application performance and availability from anywhere. It performs business transactions and performance monitoring with the help of intelligent cloud agents. It has the functionalities for establishing performance baselines and managing third-party SLAs. It provides deep user insights.

It has the capabilities of simulating the complete user journey with data instruments and measurements.

Features:

• AppDynamics can simulate the complete user journey over multi-page workflows for the website as well as third-party components.
• It will let you retest the error conditions instantly.
• You can deploy private synthetic agents across servers, networks, and data centers.
• Deploying private synthetic agents will help you with testing internal applications and isolating performance issues that impact employee productivity.
• It provides features to set up custom job schedules for synthetic jobs.

Verdict: AppDynamics gives you a comprehensive view of performance with real browsers for synthetic and real user performance. This ability helps with testing the business logic, performance of back-end systems, and page load times. It will help you understand the exact line of offending code through synthetic job triggering correlated back-end snapshots.

Price: AppDynamics offers a free trial for the platform. It has four editions: Infrastructure Monitoring Edition, Premium Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Real User Monitoring. You can get a quote for these editions.

#8) Site24*7

Best for DevOps and IT Operations teams to monitor performance.

Site24*7 offers a monitoring solution to check the availability and end-user experience. It is an all-in-one monitoring solution with capabilities to monitor a website, server, cloud, network, application, and real-user.

Features:

• Site24*7 has features for monitoring the performance of various Internet services such as REST APIs, SOAP web service, etc. from global locations.
• For synthetic web transaction monitoring, there are functionalities for recording and simulating multi-step user interaction in a real browser.
• Real User Monitoring functionality will let you analyze and segment the performance according to geography, ISP, platform, etc.
• Site24*7 has many more capabilities such as public and private cloud monitoring, RMM for MSPs & CSPs, etc.

Verdict: Site24*7 Synthetic Web Transaction Monitoring will help you to optimize various applications such as login forms and shopping carts. With every plan, Site24*7 offers advanced monitor/s and standard or premium support.

Price: Site24*7 offers four flexible pricing plans, Starter ($9 per month), Pro ($35 per month), Classic ($89 per month), and Enterprise ($449 per month). All these prices are for annual billing. A free trial is available for 30 days.

#9) New Relic

Best for providing the real-time view of your operational data in one place.

New Relic offers the platforms of Telemetry Data Platform, Full-Stack Observability, and Applied Intelligence. It provides a unified view of your applications and systems. It can be used to monitor your complete software stack.

New Relic has functionalities to analyze, troubleshoot, and optimize it. This observability platform has capabilities of applied intelligence, full-stack observability, and a Telemetry data platform. It provides AI-driven insights.

Features:

• Telemetry Data Platform is a tool for metrics, events, logs, and traces.
• It comes with the features of Petabyte scale, Millisecond speed, and pennies per GB.
• It provides comprehensive visibility over the software stack.
• New Relic can detect anomalies and extract insights in real-time and at a petabyte-scale with the help of its AI and Machine learning-based capabilities.

Verdict: New Relic provides an all-in-one unified UI that will give you comprehensive visibility across the software stack. The solution comes with Telemetry Data Platform, Full-Stack Observability, and Applied Intelligence. It offers free access to the platform with some limitations and simple pricing plans.

Price: New Relic will let you sign up for free and monitor your stack. It gives full platform access with 100GB of ingest per month. For the Telemetry Data Platform, the price will be $0.25 per GB ingested beyond the free limit.

For Full-Stack Observability, there are three plans: Standard, Pro, and Enterprise. Applied Intelligence price will be $0.50 per incident event beyond. All three platforms offer some services for free.

#10) eG Innovations

Best for end-user experience monitoring.

eG Innovations offer Synthetic Monitoring Services to monitor business transactions. It helps you with troubleshooting issues related to user experiences. It supports cloud-based and on-premise deployment.

eG Innovations follows four approaches to Synthetic Monitoring, Protocol Simulation, Web App Simulation, Digital Workspace Log on Simulation, and Client Session Simulation.

Features:

• Protocol Simulation will provide features of proactive tests, breakdown of response time, performance tracking over time, and simulating performance from multiple locations.
• Web App Simulation will provide features for emulating real-user interactions from multiple locations, recording of website availability, end-to-end response times, etc.
• Logon Simulator will give you complete visibility for proactive detection and troubleshooting of issues.
• For Client Session Simulation, it makes use of a record and play-back engine that is based on OCR technology.

Verdict: eG Innovations is one of the leading providers of IT Monitoring Services. It supports agentless and agent-based IT monitoring approaches.

Price: eG Innovations offers the solution with five pricing plans, Easy Evaluation, Perpetual License, Subscription, SaaS, and Audit Service. You can get a quote for these plans. A free trial is available for the platform.

#11) SolarWinds Pingdom

Best for ultimate visibility and enhanced troubleshooting through a combined solution of synthetic monitoring and RUM.

SolarWinds offers a DevOps solution that contains a tool Pingdom. It is a full-stack monitoring service. Pingdom can provide two solutions, Synthetic Monitoring & Real User Monitoring. The combined solution of synthetic monitoring and RUM will give you ultimate visibility and enhanced troubleshooting.

Synthetic Monitoring Solution can perform the proactive monitoring of web app availability, performance, and transactions. Real User Monitoring Solution will give you details on the web app performance from the end user’s perspective. It can be used to perform transaction monitoring such as URL hijacking, shopping cart checkout, etc.

Features:

• Pingdom performs uptime monitoring from more than 100 locations.
• It can perform page speed analysis.
• For transaction monitoring, it can test simple or highly complex transactions.
• Pingdom RUM will give you insights on the performance of your website or web app with real-user insights in real-time.

Verdict: Pingdom offers all the functionalities required by digital marketers, web hosting providers, web developers, and IT/Web Ops. Synthetic Monitoring Solution can perform transaction monitoring, page speed monitoring, and uptime monitoring. RUM has capabilities of user experience monitoring, shareable reports, and user behavior metrics.

Price: SolarWinds offers a fully functional free trial for 30 days. Its Synthetic Monitoring price starts at $10 per month, and the Real User Monitoring price also starts at $10 per month.

#12) Dotcom-Monitor

Best for scripted transaction monitoring for modern web applications.

Dotcom-Monitor’s all-in-one monitoring platform tests performance, functionality, and uptime from real browsers to accurately understand how your web pages, web applications, APIs, and services are performing for users in real-time.

Dotcom-Monitor makes it easy to ensure uptime, performance, and availability on a global scale, from the end-user’s perspective. Complete end-to-end monitoring solutions include:

• Web Services Monitoring: Monitors web services such as SOAP, GET/POST, TCP, ICMP, & SSL Certificates for uptime, performance & functionality.
• Web Page Monitoring: Monitor single page load times, and element-level details, with real browsers from data centers around the world.
• Web Application Monitoring: Monitor multi-step web transactions for performance, functionality, & accessibility around the globe.
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Monitor performance & functionality of multiple Internet services through a highly configurable platform.
• Performance Counter Monitoring: Monitor memory, disk utilization, & bandwidth through Linux, Windows, & custom performance counters across multi-locations.
• Load/Stress Testing: LoadView by Dotcom-Monitor is an on-demand, cloud-based load testing platform for websites, web applications, & APIs.

Price: Get started with a 30-day free trial. No credit card required. Pricing is based on two factors: the total number of all monitored steps in all the monitored scenarios within an account, and the frequency of monitoring. Please refer to our website for details on all available packages, and to calculate a customized plan (starting at $19.95 /month).

#13) Datadog HQ

Best for API and browser tests that will give proactive and end-to-end visibility.

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring will help you ensure uptime, identify regional issues, and manage your SLAs and SLOs. Synthetic API and browser tests let you proactively identify issues in application endpoints before they impact your customers. Customize tests to run from any Datadog-managed location across the globe and use a code-free web recorder to get tests set up in minutes.

Datadog’s tests ensure that end-users are able to perform critical business transactions, such as visiting your home page, adding items to a shopping cart, and logging in.

Because Datadog Synthetics is tightly integrated with the rest of the Datadog platform, you can get end-to-end visibility into user-facing performance by monitoring the results of Synthetics tests alongside application or infrastructure metrics on real-time dashboards.

Features:

• For the code-free test creation, Datadog offers the feature of Web-Recorder.
• It has continuous, automated testing capabilities so you can still identify issues during off-hours.
• Datadog has sophisticated alerting capabilities that alert team issues, while minimizing false positives.
• It can track SLAs and SLOs.
• It has easy sorting and filtering with tags.

Verdict: Datadog has sophisticated alerting capabilities and allows for easy setup of Synthetic monitoring and tests. It can quickly monitor critical user journeys and help you troubleshoot issues faster. It is proactive in monitoring site availability.

Price: For Synthetic Monitoring, Datadog offers two pricing plans, API Tests (it starts at $5 per ten thousand test runs per month) and Browser Tests (it starts at $12 per thousand test runs per month). You can try the platform for free.

Conclusion

Synthetic Monitoring tools and services perform the monitoring of business transactions actively and continuously. This helps in the preemptive identification of problems. For the active simulation of user transactions to IT applications, Synthetic Monitoring makes use of software robots and evaluates the performance and availability of these applications.

Datadog is our top recommended solution for Synthetic Monitoring, as it has all the end-to-end testing capabilities for all development stages. It is the platform for API tests, Browser Tests, CI/CD Testing, and full-stack visibility. It will let you monitor any environment from your secured private locations.

We hope this article will guide you in choosing the right Synthetic Monitoring Tools and Services.

Research Process:

• Time taken to research and write this article: 26 Hours
• Total tools researched online: 28
• Top tools shortlisted for review: 10