The Best Synthetic Monitoring Tools

Synthetic monitoring tools allow businesses to simulate user interactions with their website. They help identify and troubleshoot issues before they impact real users. But, with so many options on the market, choosing the best Synthetic monitoring tool for your unique needs and resources can be challenging.

We have compiled a list of the ten best synthetic monitoring tools to help you make an informed decision. With this information in hand, you can take proactive steps to maintain your website’s uptime and user experience!

Here is our list of the best synthetic monitoring tools:

1. Pingdom – FREE TRIAL From SolarWinds provides unique features, including 24/7 monitoring and a global network of monitoring locations for comprehensive testing. Start a 30-day free trial.
2. Dynatrace Offers a popular Synthetic Monitoring tool that simulates user interactions and proactively identifies performance issues.
3. Nagios Offers comprehensive web transaction monitoring capabilities that can help improve website performance, availability, and more.
4. Datadog’s Synthetic monitoring solution identifies performance issues in applications, websites, or APIs from various locations worldwide.
5. Site 24×7 A cloud-based monitoring platform that helps ensure resource uptime and performance in real-time.
6. AppDynamics By Cisco offers Browsing Synthetic Monitoring to monitor applications, APIs, user experience, and infrastructure.
7. New Relic’s Synthetic Monitoring allows users to simulate interactions and detect performance issues before impacting real users.
8. Zabbix A powerful free and open-source monitoring platform that can monitor networks, infrastructure, services, and more.
9. Sematext Offers a robust cloud-based full-stack monitoring and analytics platform with a top-notch Synthetic Monitoring Tool.
10. Uptrends Offers robust synthetic monitoring solutions to monitor the uptime, performance, and accuracy of websites, APIs, and servers from over 230 worldwide locations.

The Best Synthetic Monitoring Tools

If you’re serious about providing a top-notch online experience for your users, you need to equip yourself with the best synthetic monitoring tools available.

1. Pingdom – FREE TRIAL

Pingdom is a SolarWinds platform for website monitoring with real-time alerts and reporting. It provides complete visibility into uptime, availability, and performance. If you're looking for a reliable synthetic monitoring tool, consider checking out Pingdom— a fantastic service for checking website uptime, page speed, and other performance metrics.

Key Features:

• Simulate visitor interaction to ensure your website is available, fast, and working correctly
• Monitors webpage load times to identify any issues causing slow performance
• Developer-friendly API to leverage performance insights from synthetic monitoring within your existing systems
• Pingdom monitors website uptime It immediately alerts you if your website goes down
• Pingdom continuously monitors page speed to ensure fast load times
• Customizable status pages These pages provide you with real-time status updates for your visitors

Pingdom's unique feature set is what differentiates it from other synthetic monitoring tools. First and foremost, it offers 24/7 monitoring to ensure your website is always up and running. It also provides a global network of monitoring locations, allowing you to test your website's performance from different locations.

Pricing Plans: The price for Pingdom's Synthetic monitoring starts from $10 /month with 10 Uptime, 1 Advanced, and 50 SMS.

Free trial: Start a 30-day free trial that includes Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring.

Start 30-day Free Trial!

2. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a leading software intelligence company with various products and services. One of their most popular offerings is the Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring tool. This tool is popular among industry experts and customers for its comprehensive capabilities and ease of use.

Key Features:

• AI-powered Causation-based AI powers Dynatrace modules
• Simplicity Dynatrace's pricing is simple. It provides the necessary solutions for your use case without countless SKUs and limitations
• Predictable and transparent pricing You can grow your business with volume discounts that scale predictably
• Flexibility You can use any combination of Full-stack, Infrastructure, and Digital experience monitoring where you need it
• Collaboration Collaborate more effectively with shared dashboards and reports that provide a unified view of system performance

Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring allows businesses to simulate user interactions with their digital properties, including websites, mobile applications, and APIs. It enables them to identify performance issues proactively and gives them ways to optimize their systems to provide the best possible user experience.

Pricing Plans: Synthetic Monitoring is covered in Digital experience monitoring. The pricing starts at $11/ month for ten annual units.

Free Trial: Start a 15-day free trial.

3. Nagios Core

Nagios is one of the industry’s most reliable and trusted names. It has provided enterprise-level IT infrastructure monitoring solutions since 2015 with Nagios XI and open-source and free solutions with Nagios Core. Nagios Core makes monitoring the health of servers, applications, and network devices easy and quick— responding to issues before they become significant problems.

Key Features:

• Monitoring the availability of web-based applications and services makes Nagios stand out
• URL monitoring Monitor specific URLs to ensure they are accessible and functioning correctly
• HTTP status monitoring Nagios can monitor HTTP status codes to detect issues with web applications, such as 404 errors or other server responses
• Content monitoring Keep track of web application content to ensure it loads correctly and provides the intended user experience
• Hijack detection Alert administrators to unauthorized web applications or website content changes
• Real-time visibility into web application performance to quickly detect and respond to issues with minimal delays

Regarding synthetic monitoring tools, Nagios offers a comprehensive solution for web transaction monitoring, which includes monitoring websites, web apps, web transactions, and web services. Nagios’ web transaction monitoring capabilities can help increase web form and website availability, improve website performance, and provide valuable capacity planning information for future upgrades.

Pricing Plans: Nagios Core is open-source, and the product is 100% free with a single license. On the other hand, the price for Nagios XI starts at $1,995 (Standard Edition) and $3,495 (Enterprise Edition).

Free download: You can download the latest and most stable version of Nagios Core from its official site or Sourceforge’s repository.

4. Datadog

Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics software. It provides businesses the tools they need to keep track of their applications, infrastructure, network, synthetic, and logs in one place. It is also worth mentioning that Datadog has been recognized (for consecutive years) as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for APM and Observability.

Key Features:

• Turn-key integrations for easy aggregation of metrics and events across the full DevOps stack
• End-to-end user experience visibility, including monitoring user journeys and detecting performance issues
• High-resolution metrics and events: Human-readable tags for understanding performance metrics
• Proactive endpoint monitoring with API tests to verify that the responses meet the expected criteria
• Validation of all system layers (HTTP, SSL, DNS, WebSocket, TCP, UDP, ICMP, and gRPC) from multiple locations worldwide
• Step-by-step screenshots and waterfall visualizations to monitor critical workflows and end-user viewpoints

One of the most popular Datadog monitoring solutions is its Synthetic Monitoring Solution, for many good reasons. First, this solution helps identify performance issues before they impact end users. It accomplished this by simulating user interactions with an application, website, or API from various locations worldwide.

Pricing Plans: There are three pricing plans, Free ($0 with one-day metric retention and 5 Hosts), Pro ($15 per month /Host), and Enterprise ($23 per month /Host)

Free Trial: Register with Datadog to try their free trial for 14 days.

5. Site 24×7

Site24x7 is a powerful monitoring platform for websites, servers, end-users, networks, the cloud, and applications. It is fully deployed and based on the cloud, so its monitoring is flexible and scalable. The goal of Site24x7, as the name implies, is to help ongoing monitoring of resources' uptime, reliability, availability, health, and performance in real-time.

Site24x7 provides a leading Synthetic Monitoring tool and service. It monitors websites and web applications and tests them from around the world. Site 24×7 tracks website uptime, response time, and transaction performance. One of the highlights of Site 24×7 is its extensive network. They provide about 110 data centers distributed across the globe and offer both Ping-based tests and browser-based synthetics.

Key Features:

• Web code scanning A feature that helps detect errors and vulnerabilities in your website code
• SSL certificate monitoring Ensure website security and avoid downtime due to certificate issues
• DNS monitoring Ensure website availability via DNS and resolve problems quickly
• Domain expiry monitoring Avoid unexpected downtime due to expired domain registration
• Website Defacement Monitor Detect unauthorized changes to your website code
• Customizable alerts and notifications Get notified of any issues with email, SMS, or push notifications options

Pricing: Site24x7 pricing plans for the all-in-one edition (with Synthetics Monitoring) are Pro ($35/month), Classic ($89/month), Elite ($225/month), and Enterprise ($449/month).

Free trial: Sign up for a 30-day free trial of Site 24×7.

6. AppDynamics

AppDynamics (by Cisco) is a leading application performance monitoring and management APM solution. It is designed for businesses of any size and industry wanting full-stack monitoring and observability.

Key Features:

• Insights into user behaviors Improve your understanding of user behavior by simulating complete user journeys
• Understand the user's experience Gain insight into synthetic and real user performance across your customers' browsers
• Proactively monitor API availability and performance across your entire application stack.
• Pinpoint erroneous code Use synthetic jobs that trigger correlated back-end snapshots and identify the exact line of offending code
• Leverage globally distributed sites to observe locations that matter to your business

AppDynamics is one of the leading names in synthetic monitoring, with their Browsing Synthetic Monitoring. It provides the right tools for proactively monitoring applications, APIs, user experience, and infrastructure. AppDynamics uses synthetic agents to keep track of business transactions and performance across essential services, ranging from the browser to APIs and the back end.

Pricing Plans: Enterprise edition (including End User Monitoring – Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring) costs $11/ month for ten annual units.

Free trial: Start a 15-day SaaS-based free trial now!

7. New Relic

New Relic is a leading software analytics company with powerful full-stack monitoring tools. Aside from their robust application monitoring, they also cover infrastructure, Kubernetes, log management, network, browser, mobile, synthetics, and serverless monitoring. The company's flagship product, New Relic One, is an all-in-one platform for observability that provides users with a comprehensive view of their entire software environment.

Key Features:

• Simulate traffic through many public and private locations to proactively identify issues
• Receive alerts for under-performant URLs, APIs, and services
• Detects issues from public cloud outages, slow third-party resources, or backend services and infrastructure
• Track the right metrics Enhance the end-user experience with metrics like first content paint and long-running tasks
• Use synthetic tests to find and eliminate errors and issues before production
• Benchmarking Measure page speed vs. your competitors. Also, isolate slow third-party resources and fine-tune live pages
• Use next-gen runtime on browsers to perform synthetic tests with fast speeds

Regarding synthetic monitoring, New Relic's product won't fall short. Their tool enables users to simulate user interactions with their applications and proactively detect issues before they affect real users.

Pricing Plans: New Relic is based on three plans: Standard ($0 /month with 100 GB data ingested), Pro, and Enterprise. For Pro and Enterprise pricing, contact New Relic to get a quote.

Free Download: Sign up to start the free New Relic Standard edition today.

8. Zabbix

Zabbix is a powerful open-source and enterprise-level monitoring platform capable of monitoring the full stack. It can monitor networks, infrastructure, servers, services, apps, and the cloud. Being enterprise-ready, Zabbix can scale to any infrastructure— from small home setups to large multi-tenant enterprise environments.

Key Features:

• Smart alerts for anomalies Get automatic notifications for unusual events or trends in data
• Native support for IoT monitoring Built-in support for tracking and analyzing IoT device-generated data
• Load balancing for UI and API Ensure optimal performance balancing user interface and API loads
• Various usability improvements Improve user experience and ease of use with usability
• Integrations Zabbix integrates with external alerting systems and ITSM Systems
• Testing environments Test applications and services in a controlled environment before they impact real users

Zabbix has also earned an excellent reputation as one of the best synthetic monitoring tools. Their solution makes it ideal for testing the performance and reliability of critical applications and services before they go live. It can collect data from complex scenarios and perform availability checks. It can keep track of the cloud, microservices, apps, and devices with HTTP endpoints.

Pricing Plans: Zabbix synthetic monitoring tool is free to download and use. However, if you use it in a commercial context, buying some level of commercial support is recommended to help in the Zabbix development.

Download Zabbix: Download Zabbix. It is free and open-source.

9. Sematext

Sematext is a cloud-based full-stack monitoring and analytics platform. It can be used by businesses of any industry and size to stay on top of their application’s performance, user experience, and infrastructure health.

Sematext is a well-known provider with a top-notch Synthetic Monitoring Tool. Their solution is designed to provide fast and consistent websites and API to your visitors or end-users. It offers synthetic monitoring and testing tools to track the availability and accessibility of your APIs, websites, and web transactions. Additionally, Sematext’s synthetic monitoring can check SSL certificates and Certificate Authority.

Key Features:

• HTTP, API, and Browser monitor to track website, API, and application availability from designated checkpoints worldwide
• Website performance monitoring tools alert you when your website is unavailable or a transaction is slow or failing
• Check the validity of your SSL/TLS certificates to ensure website reliability and accessibility
• End-to-end visibility Monitor application performance metrics, logs, site uptime, APIs, and frontend user experience all in one place
• Notification Alerts Get notifications on your preferred channel (email, Slack, WebHooks, etc.) for performance issues
• Certificate Authority Checks Perform Certificate Authority (CA) checks to ensure the authenticity of certificates
• Core Web Vitals Monitor Core Web Vitals to provide an optimal user experience

Pricing Plans: Sematext provides three different pricing plans: Pay-As-You-Go ($2/HTTP monitor or $7/Browser monitor), Standard ($29/month for 40 HTTP monitors and 5 Browser monitors), and Pro ($99/month for 100 HTTP monitors and 15 Browser monitors).

Free Trial: Register to try the standard free trial for 14 days.

10. Uptrends

Uptrends is a leading provider of synthetic monitoring solutions. They provide powerful tools for monitoring the uptime, performance, and accuracy of your websites, APIs, web applications, and servers. The goal of Uptrends is to ensure a seamless digital experience for end-users. With Uptrends, businesses can proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact these end-users.

Uptrends allow you to test multi-step API calls, verify the functionality of your websites using real browsers, and check them from more than 230 different worldwide locations. With Uptrends, you can ensure that your web properties are always accessible and performing optimally.

Key Features:

• Website monitoring Monitor your website's availability and uptime from a global network of checkpoints
• Web performance monitoring Get insights into your website's load time, speed, and page size to optimize the user experience
• Web application monitoring Monitor the performance and availability of your web applications, APIs, and microservices
• API monitoring Ensure your APIs are running smoothly and quickly and get alerted when there are issues
• External server monitoring Monitor servers and services outside your infrastructure, such as DNS, FTP, and email

Pricing Plans: Uptrends come in five different plans: Starter ($17.50 /month), Premium ($50.27/month), Professional ($245.09 /month), Business (From $24.42/month), and Enterprise (From $58.36/month).

Free Trial: Register to get a fully-functional free Uptrends trial for 30 days.

Final Words

If you are a website and application owner, you wouldn't want something wrong with your website or app without knowing about it, right?

Synthetic monitoring tools help catch problems early and fix them quickly and easily. They ensure the performance, availability, and reliability of websites, applications, APIs, and digital services.

With the wide range of options available in the market, choosing the right tool can be a daunting task. We created this post to help you find the right one for your needs. We went through the ten best Synthetic monitoring tools. Our preferred choices are Pingdom, Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, Site24x7, and Sematext — they are pretty comprehensive when it comes to synthetic monitoring.

Which one is your favorite?