Synthetic monitoring uses automated tools to simulate user interactions with your website. Tests run from controlled environments, providing consistent, reproducible measurements.
Benefits of Synthetic Monitoring
- Consistent baseline measurements
- Detect issues before users do
- Test from multiple locations
- Run tests 24/7, even without traffic
- Great for regression testing
Common synthetic monitoring tools
- Lighthouse
- WebPageTest
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Synthetic monitoring platforms (like VitalSentinel)
RUM vs Synthetic
Both are valuable and complementary:
- Synthetic: Controlled conditions, consistent measurements, good for baselines
- RUM: Real-world conditions, actual user experience, catches edge cases
What synthetic monitoring measures
- Page load performance
- Lighthouse scores
- Core Web Vitals (lab values)
- Accessibility issues
- SEO problems
How VitalSentinel handles this
VitalSentinel's Synthetic Monitoring runs scheduled Lighthouse tests on your critical URLs, tracks scores and Core Web Vitals over time, and alerts you the moment a deploy regresses performance. Catch issues in hours instead of waiting for users to complain or for field data to accumulate.
Related Terms
Lab Data
Performance metrics collected in controlled testing environments using tools like Lighthouse, as opposed to field data from real users.
Lighthouse
An open-source automated tool by Google for auditing the quality of web pages, measuring performance, accessibility, SEO, and more.
PageSpeed Insights
A Google tool that analyzes web page content and provides suggestions to make pages faster, combining both lab and field data.
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
A type of performance monitoring that captures and analyzes data from actual user sessions visiting a website.