AppDynamics’ 2017 App Attention Index found that 32 percent of consumers have taken their online business elsewhere due to a poor digital experience. But what do you do when you’re an employee and your company’s internal applications perform poorly – and you can’t take your business elsewhere? We’ve all been there: we end up unhappy and unproductive, and our company suffers.
To help keep these internal applications running great, AppDynamics’ Winter ‘17 product release includes a new addition to Synthetic Monitoring, called private synthetic agents. But before we get to that, let’s review a few things first…
What is Synthetic Monitoring and Why Do People Need it?
AppDynamics helps keep digital experiences running smoothly in some of the world’s most challenging environments by monitoring the traffic coming from real users, detecting anomalies, and capturing detailed data for troubleshooting. While monitoring real-user traffic is critical, it has some fundamental limitations:
– How can you detect a failure that happens at 2AM when you upgrade a service, and nobody is using your system?
– What if a failure happens in a component that you can’t instrument, like the DNS system, your TLS certificates, or a 3rd-party SaaS application that’s critical to your business?
– How can you be sure that the application actually works correctly, not just “normally”?
For these reasons, Synthetic Monitoring, or periodically checking that your application works as designed, continues to be a key part of a modern application monitoring solution. AppDynamics offers simple, Selenium-based Synthetic Monitoring within the context of our unified monitoring platform.
What do we mean by unified monitoring? Modern software systems are labyrinths of interacting components: web pages, web servers, microservices, databases, load balancers, and more. When your application breaks, the root-cause of the problem can be anywhere in this labyrinth, and the symptom can be somewhere else entirely.
Unified monitoring means that you can always find the root-cause, no matter where the symptom arose. When you get an alert from Synthetic Monitoring, AppDynamics correlates tracing data from all the components of your system so you can pinpoint the root cause no matter where it lies.
Synthetic Monitoring for Internal Applications
AppDynamics Winter ‘17 Release brings Synthetic Monitoring to your internal network. Install the Private Synthetic Agent software on your servers to monitor the availability and performance of internal websites and services that aren’t accessible from the public Internet. Private Agents work just like Hosted Agents, including a range of real web browsers.
You can also set up Private Agents in branch facilities to check availability and performance for your distributed workforce, or in your datacenter to isolate the impact of network latency on end-user performance.
Bonus: Synthetic Monitoring now supports mobile browser emulation. Make sure your mobile site works too by adding synthetic checks for a variety of popular mobile devices.
Learn more about Synthetic Monitoring or schedule a demo today!