Synthetics Overview

5 minutes  

Splunk Synthetic Monitoring provides visibility across URLs, APIs and critical web services to solve problems faster. IT Operations and engineering teams can easily detect, alert and prioritize issues, simulate multi-step user journeys, measure business impact from new code deployments and optimize web performance with guided step-by-step recommendations to ensure better digital experiences.

Ensure Availability: Proactively monitor and alert on the health and availability of critical services, URLs and APIs with customizable browser tests to simulate multi-step workflows that make up the user experience.
Improve Metrics: Core Web Vitals and modern performance metrics allow users to view all their performance defects in one place, measure and improve page load, interactivity and visual stability, and find and fix JavaScript errors to improve page performance.
front-end to back-end: Integrations with Splunk APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, On-Call and ITSI help teams view endpoint uptime against back-end services, the underlying infrastructure and within their incident response coordination so they can troubleshoot across their entire environment, in a single UI.
Detect and Alert: Monitor and simulate end-user experiences to detect, communicate and resolve issues for APIs, service endpoints and critical business transactions before they impact customers.
Business Performance: Easily define multi-step user flows for key business transactions and start recording and testing your critical user journeys in minutes. Track and report SLAs and SLOs for uptime and performance.
Filmstrips and Video Playback: View screen recordings, film strips, and screenshots alongside modern performance scores, competitive benchmarking, and metrics to visualize artificial end-user experiences. Optimize how fast you deliver visual content, and improve page stability and interactivity to deploy better digital experiences.

Synthetics overview Synthetics overview

Last Modified Mar 22, 2024

Subsections of 5. Synthetics Overview

Synthetics Home Page

Click on Synthetics in the main menu. This will bring us to the Synthetics Home Page. It has 3 distinct sections that provide either useful information or allow you to pick or create a Synthetic Test.

Synthetic main Synthetic main

  1. Onboarding Pane: Training videos and links to documentation to get you started with Splunk Synthetics.
  2. Test Pane: List of all the tests that are configured (Browser, API and Uptime)
  3. Create Test Pane: Drop-down for creating new Synthetic tests.

Info

As part of the workshop we have created a default browser test against the application we are running. You find it in the Test Pane (2). It will have the following name Workshop Browser Test for, followed by the name of your Workshop (your instructor should have provided that to you).

To continue our tour, let’s look at the result of our workshop’s automatic browser test.

Exercise
  • In the Test Pane, click on the line that contains the name of your workshop. The result should look like this:

Synthetics-overview Synthetics-overview

  • Note, On the Synthetic Tests Page, the first pane will show the performance of your site for the last day, 8 days and 30 days. As shown in the screenshot above, only if a test started far enough in the past, the corresponding chart will contain valid data. For the workshop, this depends on when it was created.
  • In the Performance KPI drop-down, change the time from the default 4 hours to the 1 last hour.
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How often is the test run, and from where?

The test runs at a 1-minute round-robin interval from Frankfurt, London and Paris

Next, let’s examine the infrastructure our application is running on using Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring (IM).