Cloud Native Development Patterns and Best Practices

Synthetic transaction monitoring

Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) is continuous testing in production. We use this technique to generate a regular, consistent, and deterministic flow of traffic through the system. STM is considered proactive monitoring because the teams generate the traffic. Instead of waiting for users to produce traffic and instead of relying on intermittent manual smoke testing, the teams define a sufficient set of scripts that provide just enough test coverage to give the teams confidence that their components are healthy.

Synthetic transactions include more than simple pings to check for uptime. A significant amount of information and confidence can be derived from simple uptime checks. They are so easy to implement ...