What is Synthetic Testing: A Conceptual Overview

OVERVIEW

Synthetic testing is a proactive method to gain insights into how users interact with your application by simulating their behavior. The primary objective of synthetic testing is to identify and address potential issues related to performance, functionality, and other aspects before they impact real users. This method is also referred to as active or proactive monitoring.

In synthetic testing, a simulated environment replicates real-world user interactions with software applications. It involves generating synthetic data, creating scenarios, and employing virtual users to assess the software's performance, functionality, and robustness. These tests are crucial in developing complex software applications and websites, offering detailed information on their performance and user experience.

As per the data, 88% of the users do not return to the websites after a bad user experience. This bad experience could be due to high page loading time. Testing the websites' performance with real users is crucial to avoid such issues. However, before the release of the software application in the market, it is difficult to get real users on the same page.

Moreover, traditional testing setups often struggle to accurately replicate real-world scenarios, including unexpected spikes in user traffic or diverse user interactions. Synthetic testing solves this challenge by enabling developers to construct controlled testing environments that closely simulate real situations. By creating artificial data and scenarios, teams can thoroughly assess their software's functionality, robustness, and scalability. This approach ensures a more comprehensive evaluation than relying solely on real-world usage.

In this tutorial, we will discuss synthetic testing, how it works, and how it is performed. This tutorial will give the reader comprehensive information on synthetic testing to help them start with it. Let us begin this discussion by understanding synthetic testing.

What is Synthetic Testing?

Synthetic testing, or simulated or anticipatory monitoring, is instrumental in identifying performance issues within critical user journeys by replicating genuine user traffic. This proactive approach helps organizations pinpoint and resolve potential availability and performance hitches before they impact real users, hence its classification as active or anticipatory monitoring.

This type of testing investigates various variables to uncover issues before they affect authentic end-users. It allows for evaluating different kinds of traffic, such as web, audio, and video, and tracking traffic through various routing paths. Additionally, diverse user actions like browsing, logging in, and checking out can be tested. Furthermore, traffic can be generated from different geographical locations to assess the user experience across regions, for example, comparing New Zealand to San Francisco.

The Need for Synthetic Testing

Below are some of the reasons why synthetic testing is needed in the software development process and Quality Assurance (QA):

• It helps detect the software application's issues very early and before it gets released to the end-users.
• It helps replicate real-world conditions that are impossible in the real world. When you need to mimic the real user condition, you perform synthetic testing that allows the simulation of complex scenarios like high user traffic, extreme usage patterns, and others.
• It performs synthetic testing to evaluate how efficiently software applications can manage different levels of loads that help ensure scalability and prevent issues when the user base expands.
• It evaluates the APIs across various locations and time intervals throughout the day. Utilize the gathered data as a reference point for your performance benchmarks, helping find areas of the software application that require additional attention.
• While you design your website and applications to respond swiftly to user actions, unexpected traffic surges may occur. It also allows you to perform artificial tests, revealing how your server reacts under varying loads. This information lets you devise necessary measures to ensure your site and applications scale smoothly.
• It proves invaluable when introducing new features and enabling comprehensive testing before the official launch. This approach allows you to measure the application's performance under load, identifying any potential impact on third-party APIs.
• It contributes to delivering a superior user experience. By proactively addressing potential issues and ensuring the reliability and responsiveness of software applications, synthetic testing helps build confidence in the software, leading to increased user satisfaction.

The Benefits of Synthetic Testing

Some of the vital significance of synthetic testing include the following:

• Minimize Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)

In case of a synthetic test failure, a proficient synthetic testing platform will provide access to relevant data such as backend requests, error logs, and network timings. This data offers the necessary context for swift troubleshooting.

• Expand Into a New Market

When contemplating introducing your software applications into a new geographical market with limited real user traffic, synthetic testing proves invaluable for validating the anticipated performance of the software application in that location.

• Achieve Performance Objectives

Many organizations establish service level objectives (SLOs) or similar benchmarks that they anticipate their applications will achieve. Synthetic tests enable continuous monitoring to evaluate adherence to these goals, identify deviations, and determine the remaining error budget for each SLO.

• Implement Code Updates Regularly

Numerous rapidly growing organizations adopt continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines, allowing them to deploy countless minor changes to production daily. Integrating synthetic tests into CI/CD pipelines enables these organizations to maintain agility while minimizing the risk of regressions.

In addition to the above core benefits, synthetic testing also

• Allows you to validate system performance and the early identification of potential issues before they impact the end-user experience.
• Establishes a baseline for expected application behavior.
• Executes tests from the perspective of specific users. For instance, developers may evaluate how the software application performs for users requiring special accessibility features, which might not be crucial for other users.
• Involves executing advanced testing on intricate, multi-step business transactions and user journeys under various specific conditions.
• Identifies issues arising from third-party scripts and API endpoints.
• Requires supervising crucial database queries for availability and performance during low-traffic periods.
• Entails promptly notifying your team of any outages and performance issues.
• Establishes a performance baseline to track trends across different countries.
• Offers graphical user interfaces, code-free tests, and web recorders, enhancing accessibility.

The Role of Synthetic Testing in Software Testing Life Cycle

Synthetic testing is vital in the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC), ensuring the development of high-quality software applications. It enables early validation of software components, allowing for isolated evaluation and issue identification before integration. Integrated into a continuous testing process, synthetic testing ensures that new code changes undergo automated testing in a controlled environment. It also facilitates proactive monitoring and alerting, providing timely notifications for deviations from expected functionality.

In STLC, load and stress testing assess software performance under peak usage. Synthetic testing complements these tests by simulating real-world usage patterns and extreme scenarios. It generates artificial loads on the application, replicating high volumes of simultaneous user interactions to evaluate scalability and concurrency handling. It enables developers and testers to assess the application's ability to handle heavy traffic effectively.

Examples of Synthetic Testing

In this section, we will learn and understand synthetic testing with some examples.

Example 1: Synthetic Testing in Video Game Applications

Imagine you are testing a video game application to ensure its functionality and performance. However, obtaining real user experiences for this application is challenging. Instead of relying on real players to play the game and identify issues, you create computer-controlled characters that mimic real user behavior. These synthetic characters allow you to test the game's performance and detect any issues without depending on real users.

Now, let us consider a different example.

Example 2: Synthetic Testing for E-commerce Web Applications

Imagine you have developed a web application for an eCommerce site. The testers' task is to test how the application handles multiple users making purchases simultaneously. However, gathering many real users for this test is not feasible. In synthetic testing, you create automated scripts that mimic real user behavior, such as browsing the website and adding items to the cart. These simulated users enable you to analyze the web application's performance and identify any issues that may arise when handling concurrent user interactions.

Use Cases of Synthetic Testing

Some of the examples of synthetic testing use cases are explained below:

• Experiencing Minimal Traffic

As explained above, synthetic testing is a proactive method; it can be used during the development phase, either before your application goes live or immediately after deployment when traffic is scarce. Passive monitoring tools, at this stage, offer limited insights. By implementing simulated tests, you can ensure the smooth functioning of critical business transactions, identify performance bottlenecks, and uncover user experience issues before they impact real users.

• Simulating Specific Segments or Entering New Markets

Synthetic monitoring tools allow you to configure various conditions to verify your website or application for specific geographic locations, network request types, web browsers, API endpoints, and more. This feature becomes valuable when targeting specific user segments or preparing for the launch of your application in a new market.

• Monitoring Uptime and Third-Party APIs

Another use of synthetic testing is monitoring the function of the software application and how easily it is accessible to the user. Monitoring is also done for the third-party API, which are external software components or services your application relies on for specific functionalities. In case of any issue like component failure, synthetic testing tools are set up to provide timely notifications.

• Enhancing Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)

If your team adopts an iterative development approach with regular code deployments, it's smart to consider integrating synthetic testing into your CI/CD pipeline. Testing your code under various conditions before deployment reduces the chances of errors and performance issues after deployment. This proactive approach also helps prevent the accumulation of technical debt.

If you wish to learn more about the various CI/CD tools available to enhance your development and testing processes, follow this guide on the best CI/CD tools to gain valuable insights into multiple tools.

Types of Synthetic Testing

As previously mentioned, synthetic testing is categorized into different types, each with its specific objective. Let's delve into these types in the section below.

Synthetic Testing Based on the Specific Aspects of the Application Under Evaluation

It involves designing tests to focus on particular functionalities, performance metrics, or user interactions. This approach allows for targeted assessment and validation of critical components within the application.

• Availability Testing

Availability testing, called uptime monitoring, is crucial in verifying a site or application's responsiveness to user requests. Mainly, it constitutes a fundamental type of synthetic testing to ensure that the service or site is accessible and that all functions operate correctly.This testing method also tests the availability of specific content or the success of particular API calls.

Furthermore, it provides an overview of a website's general availability, typically quantified in percentages. For context, a 99.999% uptime availability is considered commendable, even though this level of performance still implies approximately 5 minutes of downtime annually. Additionally, an availability test involves sending a Ping or Get to validate the response of successful code.

The primary modes of availability monitoring include:

• Ping Testing: It measures the availability of a designated endpoint by dispatching a basic ping request. For instance, one may ping a server to confirm its reachability.
• SSL Certificate Testing: It analyzes the validity of a website's security certificates. This step safeguards against situations where Google issues security warnings to users accessing sites lacking valid SSL certificates.
• Domain Expiration Testing: It checks the expiration date of a specified domain to avert potential domain loss.
• Performance Testing

Performance testing is above the availability monitoring in its evaluation scope. It evaluates various performance metrics, such as page loading speed, the effectiveness of individual page elements, and the frequency of site errors. Additionally, it uses the native browser to load returned content for comprehensive, full-page checks and real browser monitoring.

It is well-known that issues that may not manifest in the initial response are identified by loading returned content into an authentic browser window. Performance testing effectively detects issues like delayed responses and errors caused by third-party content and sluggish responses from databases and CDNs.

Performance testing is of different types, which include the following:

• Web Monitoring: It is an essential type of performance testing that has a significant role in evaluating the responsiveness and efficiency of web applications. It considers load times, response times, and overall stability to ensure a seamless and optimal user experience.
• Mobile Monitoring: It is also a significant type of performance testing that tends to evaluate the performance of mobile applications. This process involves a detailed test of elements such as app launch times, responsiveness to user interactions, and the ability to adapt to varying network conditions. The objective is to ensure optimal performance across diverse scenarios, contributing to an excellent user experience on mobile devices.
• Multi-Browser Monitoring: It checks how healthy software applications operate across different web browsers, acknowledging the varied preferences of users. The goal is to verify consistent performance regardless of the chosen browser, executing tests on compatibility, load times, and overall functionality across popular browsers. It ensures a reliable user experience across different platforms.
• Load Testing: It mimics the multiple users accessing software applications simultaneously to evaluate their performance under peak loads. It helps identify bottlenecks and potential performance issues. With load testing, you can know how likely the software application will crash due to increased user demand.
• Stress Testing: It checks how well an application can handle more users than it's designed for. For instance, if an app is meant for 5000 users with a response time of 5 seconds, stress testing involves adding over 5000 users to see how the app responds.
• Scalability Testing: It checks how well an application can grow to handle more users or workload. It's like stretching the limits to see where the application breaks. Testers discover when the application might crash by gradually increasing the load beyond its capacity. For example, if an app can handle 3000 users with a 5-second response time, scalability testing involves adding more than 3000 users to see when it might fail.
• Fault Injection Testing: It intentionally introduces faults and defects into the software application to test their performance under abnormal conditions. Performing this test allows you to evaluate the performance of software applications for detecting, tolerating, and recovering the injected faults.
• Transaction Flow Testing

Suppose developers or QA engineers wish to measure how software applications manage a particular request, such as one involving a newly introduced feature not yet deployed to production. In that case, they can execute and test transaction flows that mimic that request.

In transaction flow testing, robotic clients aim to accomplish specific tasks, including logging into accounts, completing on-site forms, or finalizing checkout. How is this achieved? The process involves the checkpoint computer running a script to perform actions such as logging in, making purchases, completing forms, and responding to software application alerts. Transaction monitoring tests the "happy paths" of user interactions by tracking, analyzing, and simulating each user click to validate and verify the various steps within a transaction.

• Component Testing

In distributed software applications, like microservices applications, component testing proves valuable for ensuring the reliability of specific software application components, such as a particular microservice. Synthetic monitoring, an essential aspect of component testing, involves directing requests to the microservice and measuring its response.

• Smoke Testing

It is an initial and basic level of software testing to determine whether the software build is stable enough for more comprehensive testing. Smoke testing, a crucial component of this process, involves the execution of test cases on a new build of an application to verify its main functionality quickly. Its main aim is to find issues that can prevent further testing.

Synthetic Testing is Based on the Application Layer Being Tested:

It involves tests at different levels, such as the user interface, API, or database layers. This approach comprehensively evaluates the application's functionality, performance, and reliability across various architectural components.

• Browser Testing

Browser monitoring is essential for emulating the performance of various browsers during the loading of your website and application, ensuring the delivery of an optimal user experience.

Given the multitude of frameworks and third-party APIs used by websites and apps, confirming their seamless functioning across different operating systems and browsers your audience uses becomes crucial. These evaluations are performed from diverse global locations, providing insights into load speed, availability, HTTP codes, and immediate alerts in case of any issues.

Various tools are available to assist with browser testing, ensuring websites function smoothly across multiple browsers and devices. For more in-depth information on popular tools, refer to this blog on the best cross-browser testing tools. This blog provides valuable insights on each tool with unique features, enabling you to select the best option based on your needs.

Testing holds significant importance in the software development process. The behavior of your mobile and web applications across different browsers or devices can be evaluated through cloud platforms like LambdaTest.

LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you run manual and automated tests at scale with over 3000+ real devices, browsers, and OS combinations. This platform ensures the seamless functioning of your web application across diverse platforms and browsers. Additionally, it offers mobile testing labs equipped with emulators, simulators, and a real device cloud.

Automation testing proves beneficial for more efficiency in test execution. It is particularly advantageous in intricate projects where managing multiple repetitive test cases within tight time constraints is essential.

Watch this comprehensive video tutorial to enhance your testing efficiency with the LambdaTest platform. It covers valuable functionalities and features that can benefit your testing process.

To explore automation testing concepts, subscribe to the LambdaTest YouTube Channel and access tutorials on Selenium testing, Cypress testing, Playwright testing, and more.

• API Testing

The functionality of both internal and external APIs significantly influences the success of your website or application. Consequently, monitoring these APIs to ensure their expected operation becomes imperative for your business.

By adopting a synthetic monitoring approach, you can promptly identify underperforming APIs, preventing any negative impact on users' experiences. This approach furnishes comprehensive insights into potential bottlenecks, facilitating quick resolution.

API tests can be categorized into various sub-types, each serving specific purposes.

• HTTP Tests: This form of testing serves to validate the accessibility and responsiveness of applications to requests from other services. Additionally, it evaluates crucial factors such as page load times, status codes, and the content found in headers and bodies.
• SSL Tests: SSL tests are executed to ensure users' secure access to a website by verifying the authenticity of SSL certificates.
• TCP Tests: This type of test allows you to confirm the availability of critical service ports, such as SSH (22) and DNS (53).
• DNS Tests: With DNS tests, you can monitor DNS records' resolution and lookup times, thereby identifying potential configuration errors or detecting DNS attacks.
• ICMP Tests: ICMP tests help distinguish network delays and connectivity issues.
• Multistep API Tests: Multistep API tests involve chaining multiple HTTP tests into a single test to monitor sequential workflows. This capability also facilitates the evaluation of scenarios where data needs to be passed from one endpoint to another.

These diverse synthetic tests belong to a wide range of use cases. For instance, a financial website company may implement a multistep API test to validate a user authentication workflow. Organizations dealing with sensitive information like credit card data might run SSL tests for security assurance. An eCommerce company could utilize cross browser testing to ensure the smooth operation of the checkout process on various browser versions.

What is Real User Monitoring (RUM)?

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a performance monitoring process that gathers detailed data about how users interact with an application. It collects metrics, such as page views or navigation, clicks, and interactions with various elements, to gain insights into the actual user experience.

A user session, a click path, or a user’s journey represents a user's actions while using an application. User sessions vary widely, with one user completing multiple actions, like filling out forms and clicking buttons, while another might follow a different path. It allows tracking each user action within a session, including time taken, to identify patterns and areas for improvement.

In the following section, let's explore the distinctions between synthetic testing and Real User Monitoring.

Synthetic Testing vs. Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Synthetic testing and Real User Monitoring monitor the website and web app performance. However, both hold specific differences that need to be known. It will allow you to analyze when to choose synthetic testing and Real User Monitoring.

Synthetic testing and Real User Monitoring assess website and web app performance. However, their approach and purpose differ, influencing when each method is best utilized. Understanding these distinctions helps determine whether to opt for synthetic testing or Real User Monitoring.

Given the differences between synthetic testing and Real User Monitoring, no definitive answer favors one. The optimal approach often incorporates both methods when dealing with websites, applications, or services. Synthetic testing provides the advantage of establishing a consistent testing environment by eliminating variables. However, Real User Monitoring and synthetic testing contribute valuable insights into an application's performance.

Combining synthetic testing and Real User Monitoring enables a comprehensive exploration of specific user issues and facilitates identifying and resolving any problems in the software application. Collectively, these tools offer complete visibility into user and service performance, allowing for evaluation of the optimal speed required to ensure user satisfaction and deliver peak performance.

How Does Synthetic Testing Work?

Synthetic testing mimics real user traffic by generating simulated requests to applications and services from various browsers, devices, and global locations. This method monitors website transactions and application endpoints across different network layers, providing valuable insights into uptime, response time, and regional performance issues.

A robotic client application is installed on browsers, mobile devices, or desktop computers to execute synthetic testing. This application systematically initiates automated test calls, emulating a user's actions during site navigation. These simulated transactions are initiated from diverse operating systems and global locations, facilitating data collection on factors like uptime, response time, downtime, and errors.

It can be deployed manually or through synthetic testing platforms or tools, allowing tests to run at specific fixed intervals. Automation saves time and effort, enhancing efficiency.

Synthetic testing can be strategically applied within the firewall or beyond, providing insights into global availability and performance. Server calls and testing scripts are transformed into monitoring tools, executed regularly from designated client browsers or multiple browsers at diverse server locations, accurately evaluating site availability and responsiveness globally.

Although synthetic testing is primarily performed in production or within test environments to ensure seamless functionality of new features before deployment, it has limitations. It may not capture unexpected errors originating from real user behaviors not covered by test conditions. Pairing synthetic testing with Real User Monitoring bridges this gap, ensuring comprehensive coverage and differentiation between latency caused by architectural issues and hardware problems.

Analyzing test results alongside software application and infrastructure performance data is essential for discerning these challenges.

Requirements for Synthetic Testing

When you are involved in performing synthetic testing, you must keep in mind specific components of creating a reliable test environment. Here are those in detail:

• Clearly Defined Objectives

The effectiveness of synthetic testing relies heavily on having well-defined goals. Organizations must recognize what they aim to measure before creating and deploying test scripts. This ensures that the collected data is directly relevant to these established objectives.

• Adaptable Robot Clients

Robotic clients are essential components of synthetic testing, serving as its backbone. However, as testing strategies evolve, organizations need client components that can be easily configured to adapt to changes in their on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments. This adaptability ensures a smooth transition in sync with the ever-changing nature of technological landscapes.

• Synthetic Testing Tools

Software applications designed for synthetic testing are crucial in automating and simulating real user interaction with web apps, websites, and services. These tools are instrumental in evaluating the functionality of software applications, enabling the creation of automated and controlled test scenarios. They offer scripting capabilities, diverse test configurations, and reporting functionality to streamline the testing process and ensure comprehensive coverage.

Hosted Graphite

It offers users a comprehensive infrastructure monitoring environment. While excelling in network and server monitoring, it goes beyond providing application and business intelligence monitoring capabilities.

Kentik

Kentik Synthetics, equipped with infrastructure, traffic, and path awareness, autonomously identifies key locations for testing to troubleshoot performance immediately after deployment. By leveraging flow information, Kentik autonomously determines optimal paths for synthetic tests, ensuring test data accurately reflects actual paths. It remains fully aware of traffic dynamics, allowing test configurations to adapt to network traffic and infrastructure changes.

Sematext

Sematext Synthetics simplifies the initiation process without requiring code modifications on your website. It facilitates the creation of monitors for individual resources, enabling the setup of alerts based on predefined criteria. The synthetic monitoring tool gathers data on various website performance metrics, presenting it in easy-to-read dashboards for a comprehensive overview. This data helps in debugging and quickly identifying the root cause of issues.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring offers continuous and on-demand insights into application performance, reliability, and user experience. Combined with Dynatrace RUM, it captures a wide range of user behavior, facilitating an understanding of common clickstreams and unexpected actions that may impact resources or lead to unusual application behavior.

Datadog

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring integrates various features, enabling team members to run code-free API and browser tests globally. Tests can be performed in production or at any CI/CD pipeline stage for early issue detection. Datadog Synthetic Monitoring provides clear visualizations and contextual information for every test failure, including backend requests, error logs, host-level metrics, and network data, facilitating quick and effective troubleshooting.

Uptime

Uptime offers two synthetic monitoring solutions: Uptime Robot and Better Uptime. Both platforms allow synthetic tests at intervals ranging from 5 to 60 minutes. Uptime Robot conducts tests on various forms and performs SSL tests, DNS checks, and keyword checks, aiding in the early detection of issues. Additionally, Uptime sends text and email alerts for encountered issues, ensuring timely notification and resolution.

CloudQA

CloudQA by TruMonitor offers a comprehensive solution for handling the complexities of website development. It assists in detecting bugs in your site's functionality before they impact end users, allowing you to run tests on critical custom journeys and ensuring your applications are available and up to date. With CloudQA, you can significantly reduce manual troubleshooting time by running automated performance tests.

New Relic

New Relic Synthetics offers synthetic monitoring software that provides detailed tests to detect potential user errors before they occur. Utilizing a Java-like script language allows for building advanced tests and quick problem identification. Ensure your most critical transactions run smoothly, with tests alerting you of issues within seconds.

It ensures comprehensive coverage with testing capabilities from eight global locations, including private locations behind your firewall. It is a popular tool with a robust community of developers, providing support whenever questions arise.

Additionally, LambdaTest provides seamless integration with New Relic, enabling you to leverage detailed monitoring insights. Integrating New Relic with LambdaTest allows you to gain deeper visibility into your application's performance and user experience, ensuring optimal functionality across different environments and devices.

How Do You Select the Best Synthetic Testing Tool?

Before opting for any tool, consider certain factors to ensure the most suitable selection. Consider the following points:

• User-Friendly Interface: Prioritize tools that are easy to use. If you lack scripting knowledge, opt for a record and playback tool. For those comfortable with scripting, choose solutions that support coding.
• Interaction with Online Features: Ensure the monitoring tool can interact seamlessly with sophisticated online features.
• Script Extensibility: Choose a tool that allows users to extend testing scripts, enabling the addition of more stages or the creation of complex processes.
• Reusability Functionality: Look for a solution with reusability functionality, allowing testing scripts to recall new business processes, like login or logout, as needed.
• Handling Data-Driven Test Cases: Confirm the tool's capability to effectively test all data-driven test cases.
• Minimization of False Positives: Verify the tool's capability to minimize false positives from server maintenance, malfunctions, sparse code, and other issues.
• Overhead Minimization: Ensure the tool can minimize overheads, such as retesting for false alarms.
• Consistent Functionality Across Locations: Choose a tool that functions consistently across locations, enabling the detection of latency and load problems.
• Alerting Capability: Ensure the synthetic monitoring tool can send alerts through SMS or email.
• Cross-Device and Browser Testing: Considering users access web applications through various devices, opt for a solution that allows you to extend testing across different devices and browsers.

Challenges of Synthetic Testing

When performing synthetic monitoring, specific challenges may necessitate careful consideration. These challenges include:

• Installation

The traditional approach to synthetic test development typically requires coding skills and knowledge of specific scripting languages. It poses a significant barrier for non-technical team members, as developers with the necessary skills often spend hours creating test scripts for intricate software applications.

• Fragile Tests

Even minor UI alterations, like relocating or renaming a button, can result in automated test failures, leading to a surge in false alarms and unproductive alerts while performing synthetic tests.

• Lack of Context

Many synthetic testing tools can notify about test failures without providing detailed information on the causes or the potential business impact. To address these issues, the synthetic testing industry simplifies test development, increases automation, and improves test resilience.

• Scope Limitations

Synthetic monitoring tests only simulate transactions chosen by developers, often failing to cover the full range of request types expected from real users. If a specific transaction triggers an issue not simulated during synthetic testing, the problem might go unnoticed until the application reaches production.

• System Load Increase

Synthetic testing adds to the overall workload of a system by introducing additional requests it needs to handle. While not usually a significant issue, mainly when tests are run against a testing version of a system, there's a risk of negatively impacting the digital experience for real users if synthetic tests are performed simultaneously with real user requests on a live website or web application.

• Dynamic Environments

Synthetic tests often face challenges adapting to dynamic environments, especially in rapidly changing systems or cloud-based setups. In this, a significant barrier includes keeping test scripts up-to-date with evolving applications and infrastructure.

• Dependency on Assumptions

Synthetic tests often depend on assumptions about user behavior and software application interactions. If these assumptions deviate from actual usage patterns, the effectiveness of the tests may be compromised.

Best Practices of Synthetic Testing

To improve and optimize the synthetic testing, you should include the following best practices while performing the test:

• Before initiating tests, clearly define your goals to streamline configuration, utilizing synthetic testing tools designed for ease, whether visual or script-based setups.
• Maintain a focus on context by integrating synthetic testing into an end-to-end observability platform, ensuring comprehensive visibility without additional tools.
• It should be part of a broader observability strategy to simplify the development and maintenance of synthetic testing. Organizations can seamlessly integrate synthetic testing into their overall initiatives for enhancing application performance by adopting a unified platform approach to observability.
• You should schedule the synthetic test regularly to monitor the software application performance continuously.
• Try to focus on monitoring critical transactions specific to user experience and perform tests from multiple geographic locations to evaluate global performance.

Conclusion

Synthetic testing is a crucial part of software testing as it offers excellent insight and information on the performance and reliability of software applications. In this tutorial, we discussed synthetic testing and how it works. It aimed to give immense knowledge on this test, which can be leveraged to get started. Let us summarize the key learning.

Synthetic testing mimics the real user interaction and transaction flow in different scenarios, allowing proactive monitoring. It helps detect issues in the software application and allows its continuous evaluation.

Understanding how synthetic testing works is a technical necessity and a strategic advantage for businesses seeking to deliver seamless user experiences. The ability to identify and address performance bottlenecks, ensure global accessibility, and maintain application functionality in the face of evolving technologies makes synthetic testing an indispensable tool in the software development lifecycle.