Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

Is your application’s heartbeat steady, or are you constantly chasing after alerts? In the complex world of DevOps, ensuring your application’s availability and performance is paramount. You’re not alone if you’ve ever felt like you’re playing whack-a-mole with sporadic downtime and puzzling errors. But what if you had a tool that could proactively monitor your user experience from all angles, alerting you to issues before your users notice? That’s where Datadog Synthetic Monitoring steps in, offering a way to keep a vigilant eye on your applications. This article will guide you through all you need to know about it.

What is Datadog Synthetic Monitoring?

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring is a powerful platform that lets you simulate user interactions with your applications. Think of it as having a team of virtual users constantly testing your services from various locations and under different conditions. This proactive approach helps catch problems that traditional monitoring might miss.

Instead of just checking if your servers are up, Synthetic Monitoring actively tests crucial user journeys. This might include logging in, browsing specific pages, submitting forms, or even making API calls. By mimicking real user behavior, you gain insights into how your application actually performs from your users’ perspective, allowing you to know the user experience before you get complains about it from clients.

This goes beyond basic uptime checks, as Datadog Synthetic Monitoring offers a wide variety of tests. You can check if your web pages load correctly, if your API calls return the expected data, and how your multi-step user flows function.

Why is Synthetic Monitoring Important?

Synthetic Monitoring is crucial for maintaining your application’s health and ensuring a smooth user experience. You might wonder why you need this when you have other types of monitoring in place, but here are some reasons why it’s important:

• Proactive Issue Detection: Instead of waiting for users to report problems, synthetic tests continuously check your application, helping you identify issues early, sometimes even before they impact real users. This can save you from potential reputation damage and loss of revenue.

• Geographic Performance Insights: By running tests from multiple locations worldwide, you get a clear picture of how your application performs for users in different regions. This helps identify latency issues and optimize for a global audience.

• Third-Party API Monitoring: Many applications rely on external APIs. With Synthetic Monitoring, you can ensure that these APIs are working as expected and not slowing down your services. This can help you identify the issue on a third-party service instead of focusing your time on finding the issue on your application.

• User Flow Validation: By simulating multi-step user flows, you can catch critical issues that may occur during complex user journeys, ensuring that your key features work seamlessly. For instance, you can test the full cycle of a user creating an account, adding items to a cart, and checking out, which is important for e-commerce applications.

• Reduced Downtime: Immediate alerts from synthetic tests enable you to fix problems faster, minimizing the impact on your users and reducing downtime. With these alerts, you don’t have to constantly look at your monitoring dashboard, you’ll be alerted when something needs your attention.

• Performance Baselines: Synthetic tests help establish performance baselines, allowing you to track improvements or regressions after changes to your application. It’s important to know how your application performs under normal conditions to easily spot abnormal behavior.

• Simplified Root Cause Analysis: By providing detailed test results, including network timings and resource loads, synthetic tests simplify root cause analysis and make it easy to resolve problems faster.

Key Features of Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring comes with an extensive list of features to enhance its capabilities. These features offer a deep dive into your application’s performance and user experience, making it a robust solution for monitoring all types of applications:

• Browser Tests: These tests use real browsers to simulate user interactions with your web applications, providing an accurate representation of user experience.

• API Tests: With these, you can validate the behavior and performance of your APIs. You can check HTTP methods, request and response bodies, authentication headers, and more.

• Multi-Step Tests: You can create tests that simulate complex user flows, like logging in, filling out forms, or going through an e-commerce checkout process.

• Global Test Locations: You can run your tests from multiple locations around the globe, which helps you monitor your application’s performance for a global audience.

• Alerting: Datadog’s robust alerting system will notify you immediately of any detected issues. You can tailor these alerts to your specific needs and integrate them with various communication channels.

• Visual Editor: The visual editor makes it easy to create tests without the need to code. This helps you create tests quickly and efficiently.

• Test Scheduling: With this feature, you can schedule your tests to run at specific times and intervals, according to your requirements.

• Test Variables: You can define and use variables in your tests, allowing you to customize your testing strategy with dynamic data.

• Private Locations: With Datadog Private Locations you can run tests from within your own private network, ensuring you can monitor internal applications or services that are not available on the public internet.

• CI/CD Integration: You can integrate Synthetic Monitoring with your CI/CD pipeline, enabling you to automate your testing process as part of the delivery process.

• Detailed Results: The detailed results from tests include network timings, screenshots, and console logs, making it easy to diagnose issues.

• Histories and Trends: You can track performance histories and trends over time, making it easy to identify patterns and regressions that require your attention.

• Integration with Other Datadog Products: Seamlessly integrates with other Datadog products, offering you a holistic view of your entire infrastructure.

• Customizable Test Options: Datadog offers many customizable test options, letting you fine-tune your monitoring strategy with precision.

Types of Synthetic Tests in Datadog

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring allows you to create several different types of tests that meet your monitoring requirements. Each test type is designed for specific monitoring needs:

Browser Tests

Browser Tests are designed to mimic actual user interactions with your website. They use real browsers, such as Chrome or Firefox, to simulate how users navigate and interact with your web pages.

How They Work:

1. Navigation: You define the pages to visit and simulate user actions like clicks, form submissions, and scrolls.
2. Validation: You set validation steps to check elements, like whether a button is present or the text content of a specific section is correct.
3. Real Browser: The tests run in a real browser environment, which includes rendering JavaScript, checking styles, and all the other interactions of a modern web application.

Benefits:

• Realistic User Experience: Provides an authentic user perspective, helping to catch issues that might be missed by other types of tests.
• Dynamic Content Validation: Validates JavaScript interactions and dynamic content to make sure complex web features are working correctly.
• Rich Debugging Information: Offers screenshots and browser logs for detailed debugging, speeding up root cause analysis.
• Multi-Step flows: You can use browser tests to check the behavior of the full user flow.

Use Cases:

• E-commerce: You can test checkout processes, product page functionality, and cart management.
• Web Applications: Test complex single-page applications, form submissions, and all other user interactions.
• Web Portals: Test authentication flows, content rendering, and user experience of your portals.

API Tests

API Tests allow you to validate your APIs by sending requests and asserting responses, helping to ensure that your API services are functioning as intended.

How They Work:

1. Request: You define the API endpoint to test, along with the HTTP method (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.), request headers, and request bodies (if needed).
2. Validation: You set validation steps that assert the response status codes, the content of the response body, and other response headers.
3. Data Extraction: You can extract dynamic data from responses to be used in further steps in the same test using variables.

Benefits:

• API Functionality Validation: Ensures your APIs are working correctly, and are returning the expected data.
• Early Error Detection: Helps catch issues with data format, authentication, and other API-related problems before users are impacted.
• Performance Tracking: Tracks API response times, allowing you to identify performance problems.
• Integration Testing: Tests the interactions between different APIs and services.

Use Cases:

• Backend Services: Check the reliability of your microservices and backend systems.
• Third-Party APIs: Ensure third-party API services are working correctly.
• Mobile Apps: Validate API endpoints for mobile applications.
• Internal Services: Monitor internal APIs that don’t have public endpoints.

SSL Certificate Tests

SSL Certificate tests check the validity and expiration dates of your SSL certificates. This is important because an invalid or expired SSL certificate can prevent users from accessing your website and could cause potential security issues.

How They Work:

1. URL Entry: You enter the URL of the domain you want to test.
2. Certificate Validation: The test checks the SSL certificate for validity, expiry dates, and potential errors.

Benefits:

• Security Check: Ensures your SSL certificates are valid and secure, protecting user data.
• Proactive Monitoring: You get alerts for upcoming certificate expirations, preventing downtime from expired certificates.
• Reduced Security Risks: Protects users from the risks associated with invalid SSL certificates.

Use Cases:

• Websites and Applications: Monitor the SSL certificates for all web pages and applications that rely on them.
• E-commerce Sites: Protect customers’ personal and financial information when they are interacting with e-commerce sites.
• Internal Services: Monitor SSL certificates for internal applications that are used within your organization.

DNS Tests

DNS tests check the DNS resolution of your domain. This ensures that your domain name is correctly resolving to the correct IP address, and users are routed to your application when they access your domain name.

How They Work:

1. Domain Name Entry: You provide the domain name that you want to monitor.
2. Resolution Check: The test attempts to resolve the domain name to its IP address using multiple DNS servers.

Benefits:

• Uptime Assurance: Ensures that DNS resolution is functioning correctly, so your domain name points to your server correctly.
• Early Problem Detection: Helps catch DNS issues early, preventing potential downtime and access issues.
• ISP Resolution Validation: Checks for any issues with DNS resolution from various internet service providers.

Use Cases:

• Websites and Applications: You can monitor DNS for all web pages, applications and other services.
• Email Services: Check DNS records for email servers that are used to send and receive emails.
• API Gateways: Ensure that domain name resolution is functioning correctly for all your API gateways.

Setting Up Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

Setting up Datadog Synthetic Monitoring involves a few steps, including creating your tests, configuring the test locations, setting up alerts, and integrating with other Datadog products. Let’s go through each of these steps to help you get your monitoring up and running:

Step 1: Access the Synthetic Monitoring Page

First, log in to your Datadog account. In the left-hand menu, look for “UX Monitoring” and click on “Synthetic Monitoring”. This will take you to the Synthetic Monitoring dashboard.

Step 2: Create a New Test

On the dashboard, click the button labeled “New Test”. This opens a test creation wizard, where you can select the type of test you want to create. Choose from the options: Browser, API, SSL certificate, or DNS.

Step 3: Configure Your Test

• Browser Tests: For a Browser Test, provide the URL to test, and choose from available locations. Record your user flow using Datadog’s visual editor, add assertions for validations, and set the frequency that tests should run.
• API Tests: For API Tests, provide the URL of your API endpoint, specify the HTTP method, include headers and request bodies, set validations for response status codes, and body content, and chose test frequency and locations.
• SSL Certificate Tests: For SSL Certificate Tests, specify the domain name you want to check. Choose locations from where to perform the validation, and how often you want to perform this check.
• DNS Tests: For DNS Tests, provide the domain name to test, select the desired test locations, and the test execution frequency.

Step 4: Add Assertions and Validations

Adding validations is a crucial part of setting up your tests. This ensures that the tests are checking the things that are important to you and are detecting issues that can impact your users.

• Browser Tests: For Browser tests, create validations to verify that buttons are clickable, form inputs work correctly, specific text elements appear, and other page elements are loading correctly.
• API Tests: For API tests, validate the response status codes, the data format of the response bodies and the presence of headers.
• SSL Certificate Tests: Validate the SSL certificate validity, expiry date, and potential errors like not being trusted by a certificate authority.
• DNS Tests: Validate that the domain is resolving to the correct IP address or that a specified DNS record exists.

Step 5: Choose Test Locations

Select one or more locations from the list of available global locations, which are located around the globe. If you are testing an internal application or API, you can use private locations.

Step 6: Configure Alerting

Setting up alerts helps you to be notified quickly when something requires your attention. Configure the alerts to fit your needs.

1. Create a new monitor: Create a monitor to use in your test.
2. Choose a metric to monitor: Select a metric like response time, request success or failure, or SSL certificate validity.
3. Set thresholds: Set specific thresholds to trigger an alert, and indicate whether to get notified if the value is above or below the threshold.
4. Set Alert Notifications: Choose the notification channels like email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc. You can customize these alerts to be as specific or broad as needed.

Step 7: Name and Save Your Test

Give your test a descriptive name. This helps you easily find and manage your tests. Click on “Save Test” to create the new test with all settings.

Step 8: View Test Results

Once saved, your new test will start running according to its settings. You can view its results in the dashboard. Click on the test to get more detailed results and debug the issues.
The dashboard shows you the status of each test, along with performance metrics and error details. This helps to quickly identify and troubleshoot any issues that are present.

Step 9: Integrate with Other Datadog Products

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring integrates seamlessly with other Datadog products. You can combine insights from synthetic tests with metrics from your infrastructure and logs to get a full picture of your application health.

1. Link to Infrastructure Metrics: Connect your tests to infrastructure metrics in your Datadog dashboard.
2. Correlate with Logs: Correlate issues in your tests with logs, to give a deeper understanding of root causes and where to start troubleshooting.
3. Visualize with Dashboards: Create customizable dashboards that display synthetic monitoring metrics, infrastructure metrics, and logs.

Step 10: Automate Using CI/CD

To automate your testing process, integrate Synthetic Monitoring with your CI/CD pipeline. This makes sure that your application is tested during the release cycle.

1. Use the API or CLI: Use the Datadog API or CLI tools to manage your synthetic tests programmatically.
2. Set up Automated Test Runs: Trigger tests automatically as part of your CI/CD pipeline, so tests run as part of your software delivery process.

By following these steps, you can create a very effective monitoring strategy to ensure your applications perform well and deliver a great user experience.

Advanced Techniques in Synthetic Monitoring

Once you’ve got a basic grasp of Datadog Synthetic Monitoring, you can start to explore more advanced techniques that can improve your monitoring strategy and give you deeper insights. Here are some of these techniques:

Using Variables in Tests

Variables are useful for testing different user accounts, setting up test scenarios, or dealing with dynamic information. Datadog lets you define variables in your tests for reusable data:

1. Define Variables: In your test settings, you can define variables with names and values that you want to use in the tests.
2. Reference Variables: You can reference variables in different parts of your tests, such as in the URLs of API calls or user names on browser tests. This helps to use dynamic data.
3. Dynamic Data: You can extract dynamic data from a previous step and set it as a variable. For example, when creating an account on your web app, you may want to save the id from the response to a variable that you can use in later steps.

Private Locations

Private Locations help you to monitor internal applications or APIs that aren’t publicly available. With Private locations, you can run synthetic tests from inside your private network, allowing for more realistic monitoring of your internal services.

1. Install Agent: You need to install the Datadog Agent on a server inside your network. This server will act as your private testing location.
2. Configure Tests: You can set up tests to run from this private location, allowing you to check the performance of your internal services.
3. Monitor Internal Services: By using private locations, you can monitor the performance of all internal systems, while making sure that your data is kept secure.

Using Test Scheduling

Test scheduling allows you to plan when your tests should run, which can be helpful for various scenarios:

1. Set Test Frequencies: Set the tests to run at a specific time of day or intervals. You can schedule tests to be more frequent during peak hours or less frequent during off-peak hours.
2. Automated Performance Checks: Schedule tests to run automatically after code deployments, to check application performance and catch regressions immediately.
3. Strategic Testing: Schedule tests according to specific needs to align with business operations. For instance, you may want to run specific tests before or after maintenance operations.

Multi-Step Flows

Multi-step flows help you to simulate complex user actions in your tests, allowing you to check critical user paths. This can help to catch any issues in the middle of user interactions.

1. Record User Interactions: Record user actions with Datadog’s recorder and set up the necessary steps to be performed.
2. Set Validations: Add assertions and validations to check that every step works correctly and that the user interaction is flawless.
3. User Experience Monitoring: Create multi-step flows that match the most important user journeys in your application.

Advanced Assertions

Datadog offers advanced assertions in your tests, allowing you to set up more detailed validation steps. This can help you validate more specific user interactions and data:

1. Custom Validations: Create custom validations based on your requirements. For example, you can validate specific text elements, and check for the presence of buttons.
2. Response Body Validations: Check for specific values in the response body, and set validations that help to validate that your APIs are functioning correctly.
3. Response Header Validations: Validate values in response headers, ensuring that all your APIs are configured correctly.

Integration with CI/CD Pipelines

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring integrates seamlessly with your CI/CD pipeline, allowing you to automate your testing process:

1. API and CLI Tools: Use the Datadog API or CLI to manage and trigger your synthetic tests.
2. Automated Tests: Automatically trigger synthetic tests as part of your CI/CD pipeline to validate your application changes.
3. Continuous Validation: Make sure that your application is tested each time that it is deployed, ensuring all releases are stable.

Custom Test Scripting

Datadog allows you to use custom scripts in your synthetic tests. This is helpful if you want to create custom test logic or handle complex testing scenarios.

1. Upload Scripts: You can upload custom JavaScript files that are used to run in a browser test to perform custom logic.
2. Scripting Variables: You can use variables to make the scripts more dynamic, and configurable.
3. Complex Scenarios: You can use custom scripts to validate complex user interactions and complex logic.

By using these advanced techniques, you can create a more robust and comprehensive monitoring strategy. This will improve your ability to find and address problems quickly, which results in a better user experience.

Benefits of Using Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring provides a variety of benefits, which make it a valuable tool for your monitoring toolbox. Here are some of the key advantages:

• Improved Uptime: By proactively detecting issues before they impact real users, you can keep your application running smoothly, and ensure high uptime.
• Enhanced User Experience: By using real browsers to simulate user interactions, you get a better understanding of how your users experience your application.
• Faster Incident Response: Immediate notifications about failing tests help to find and fix problems faster, which keeps users satisfied.
• Global Performance Insights: With tests running from multiple locations across the globe, you get a deep understanding of how your application performs for users all around the world.
• Reduced MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution): The detailed results from the synthetic tests, including network timings, screenshots, and console logs help to reduce the mean time to resolution.
• Cost Efficiency: By detecting issues earlier, you can save a considerable amount of money by preventing prolonged downtime and costly incident responses.
• Automated Testing: Integrating synthetic tests with your CI/CD pipeline helps you automate your testing, reducing manual work and speeding up the release cycle.
• Customizable Tests: Datadog provides many ways to customize your tests based on your needs. You can customize the testing strategy, the variables to use, the assertions, and more.
• Easy Integration: Datadog integrates seamlessly with other products, giving you a holistic view of your application’s health.
• Real User Monitoring (RUM) Integration: RUM and Synthetic Monitoring both help to catch issues, but RUM helps you catch issues that are related to user devices and networks, while Synthetic Monitoring helps you catch issues on the infrastructure. You can integrate these two types of monitoring, to get the best of both worlds.

Best Practices for Using Synthetic Monitoring

To get the most out of Datadog Synthetic Monitoring, it’s important to follow these best practices:

• Monitor Key User Flows: Set up synthetic tests to monitor critical user journeys. For example, a login flow, shopping cart experience, or a specific API call that is critical to your application’s functionality.
• Use a Wide Range of Tests: Take advantage of all the types of tests to monitor different aspects of your application. Use Browser tests for user experience, API tests for backend services, and SSL Certificate checks to ensure your certificates are valid.
• Choose Appropriate Test Locations: Choose locations that are important for your users. Make sure you are testing your application from all the areas that are critical to your business.
• Set Up Actionable Alerts: Configure your alerts to be clear and actionable. Make sure to set specific alert triggers so you don’t get an overwhelming amount of notifications.
• Automate Testing: Integrate tests with your CI/CD pipeline to automatically test your application after every release. This helps catch any regressions before they affect your users.
• Maintain Test Data: Regularly review and update your tests. Change credentials, URLs, and dynamic values as required, to keep tests working reliably.
• Use Realistic Test Data: Use realistic data in your tests that match your user’s real interactions with your application. This gives you more accurate test results.
• Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Use synthetic tests to monitor key performance metrics. This includes API response times, page load times, or error rates.
• Analyze Test Results: Monitor test results to find performance trends, patterns, and potential problems. This can help you see how your application performs over time.
• Review and Iterate: Regularly review your testing strategy, update your tests and make improvements as needed. This is a continuous process, which should be constantly evaluated.

By following these best practices, you can create a solid monitoring strategy that will help to improve your application’s reliability and provide a great user experience.

Should You Get Datadog Synthetic Monitoring?

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring is a powerful tool for those who are serious about maintaining their applications’ availability and user experience. It helps to find problems quickly, and prevent them from impacting your users. It’s easy to set up, and provides a comprehensive set of features, from browser tests to API validations.

If you are running a business-critical application and are concerned with uptime and user experience, then Datadog Synthetic Monitoring can be a valuable asset. It’s not just a monitoring tool, but a way to ensure your application’s success, by actively testing its most important functions.

If you are an SRE or a DevOps engineer tasked with keeping your applications healthy, then adding Datadog Synthetic Monitoring to your toolset can be a smart choice. It helps you make the most of your monitoring strategy, reduce downtime, and ensure your users are happy.