The Synthetic Way to Know Your Real Users
Consistent performance is key to the success of any modern application. Users now demand a swift response time when loading or working with any software application. This is particularly relevant in business sectors like eCommerce, banking, and personal health.
Through continuous performance monitoring, development companies can measure the overall health of an application. For example, they can fix issues like slow loading using a performance testing tool.
Primarily, there are two types of performance monitoring:
- Real user monitoring (RUM)
- Synthetic user testing (or synthetic testing or monitoring)
Both these techniques gather information about the user’s experience with the application. So, how is synthetic user testing different from RUM? Synthetic tests are executed before the production phase and “mimic” how real users interact with applications. RUM is executed after the application deployment. It monitors how real users interact with applications.
Let’s take a deeper dive into understanding synthetic testing and its benefits.
What Is Synthetic Testing?
Synthetic testing (or monitoring) is the technique of identifying any performance-related bottlenecks that can impair the user’s experience with applications. Synthetic testing aims to monitor application endpoints for problems before they impact the user experience.
Companies can employ synthetic testing to:
- Proactively monitor the available services
- Measure the response time of their applications
- Monitor customer interactions
How does synthetic testing work? This monitoring technique uses distributed testing engines to test the performance and availability of applications (before they are released to customers). For example, you can use synthetic testing to monitor user transactions like:
- Signing into an app or portal
- Signing up for a subscription or newsletter
- Adding retail products to an eCommerce shopping cart
- Performing the checkout process in an eCommerce store
Benefits of Synthetic Testing
Here are some of the benefits of synthetic testing for product development companies:
1. Monitor Web Applications During Peak (and Non-Peak) Time
With synthetic testing, companies can monitor the performance of their web applications at peak and off-peak times. Synthetic testing is easy to simulate for different geographical locations – and low and high-traffic zones. With 24/7 monitoring, synthetic testing can continuously monitor application performance and alert the development team about critical issues.
2. Measure Application SLAs
As more companies partner with third-party solution providers, they are now relying more on service-level agreements (SLAs). With synthetic testing, you can easily monitor the performance of any third-party tool and proactively identify performance issues. Effectively, synthetic testing can transition your company from a “reactive to a proactive” mode with complete visibility.
3. Complement RUM for Better Application Performance
To improve performance, you can also choose to combine synthetic testing with real-user monitoring (RUM). This can improve the transparency and understanding of the process workflow from the user’s perspective. An integrated approach can resolve questions such as:
- What is the end user’s experience (or issues) with your application?
- What are the typical user actions when exploring your application?
- What is the actual workflow taken by the end user?
4. Resolve Performance Issues Quickly
Synthetic testing provides access to valuable resources such as backend queries and error logs, which are useful for defining and resolving performance-related issues. This helps in reducing the overall MTTR (or mean time to resolve). Additionally, synthetic testing enables effective troubleshooting by providing an accurate context to the identified problem.
Overall, synthetic testing or monitoring can elevate your business agility and flexibility, which is necessary for adapting to changing business demands. For instance, synthetic testing can help you release an application or web app in response to a sudden event or competitor’s activity.
Next, let’s discuss how to perform synthetic testing.
How To Perform Synthetic Testing
Synthetic testing comprises the two following types namely:
- Browser tests check if app users are smoothly able to complete critical transactions like signups, checkouts, and logins.
- API tests help in monitoring application endpoints at the network layer.
Before selecting the right tool or platform for synthetic testing, ensure that it fulfills the following criteria:
- It is user-friendly and easy to use.
- It enables you to work with complex web functionalities.
- It enables users to expand their test scripts to create complex workflows.
- It has the reusability functionality to enable test scripts to recall a customer action (like signing in or out).
- It can simulate the user’s interaction with online applications across locations.
- It can record user transactions from any type of application.
- It supports customized dashboards.
How can appNeura help you perform synthetic testing? Let’s discuss that next.
How appNeura Can Help Perform Synthetic Testing
With appNeura’s synthetic monitoring tool, enterprises can easily simulate users’ experience on their web applications in their development or production environment. The appNeura tool can work for monitoring the performance of websites, web apps, in-premise apps, and APIs.
Here are some reasons why the appNeura tool is the best fit to enhance synthetic testing:
- Customized dashboards display the availability and performance of all user transactions with the application
- Provides granular details of how transactions happen across geographical locations, countries, and cities
- Compares your application performance and availability with competitor products
- Gathers visual metrics to track the user experience for each page load
- Helps in simulating an end-to-end customer journey and monitoring user actions
- Captures data at each stage of the customer journey to understand how they interact with the application
- Leverages predictive engine to forecast and fix performance issues (before they occur)
Conclusion
Synthetic testing is an innovative way to monitor application performance and availability. It can also analyze the customer journey when they interact with any application or website. In this blog, we have discussed how synthetic testing serves as a proactive way to resolve performance issues.
As part of the Avekshaa team, appNeura has enabled product development companies to simulate and monitor their application performance and end-user transactions. Our synthetic testing tool is effective at identifying application performance issues and enhancing the customer experience. Contact us today to learn more.