In the age where optimal website and application performance is non-negotiable, Synthetic User Monitoring (SUM) emerges as a powerful tool for businesses. SUM goes beyond traditional monitoring by simulating user actions and interactions on a website or application, offering insights into potential bottlenecks, lags, or errors that might impede user experience. This proactive approach ensures that organizations can identify and rectify issues before they escalate, ensuring seamless digital experiences for users.
Moreover, as digital landscapes become more intricate with the integration of AI, IoT, and advanced analytics, the importance of having a robust monitoring mechanism cannot be overstated. Synthetic User Monitoring provides businesses with consistent, controlled, and repeatable metrics, making it indispensable for maintaining high-quality digital services in an increasingly competitive online environment.
Synthetic User Monitoring
SAP Cloud ALM Synthetic User Monitoring is a 24/7 monitoring solution to detect performance and availability issues of web applications from a client-side perspective.
With Synthetic User Monitoring (SUM), you have the ability to define scenarios based on common user usage of your own or third-party web applications. This means you can simulate user interactions and test the performance and availability of your applications from a client-side perspective. One of the key features of Synthetic User Monitoring is the ability to choose a specific web browser to execute these scenarios. This allows you to accurately measure browser timings, such as UI rendering time, and gain insights into the user experience. Furthermore, Synthetic User Monitoring provides you with 24/7 monitoring of all your critical applications. You can fine-tune the monitoring frequency based on your specific needs, ensuring that you have real-time visibility into the performance and availability of your applications.
The graphic below provides a high-level overview of Synthetic User Monitoring:
Features
Monitoring of web applications via custom Selenium IDE scripts.
Scenario commands are executed from Selenium remote web driver infrastructure
Configurable scenario executions intervals
Metrics captured at the scenario step level
Evaluation of the performance based on dynamic thresholds
Configurable events in case of availability issue
Synthetic User Monitoring – How Does it Work?
Synthetic User Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM is based on annotated Selenium IDE scripts, a widely adopted open-source tool for simulating user interactions across web applications. By leveraging Selenium IDE, developers can create scripts that replicate real user behaviour. These scripts are then enhanced with monitoring annotations to capture key performance metrics during execution.
Beyond script creation, Synthetic User Monitoring enables scheduled execution of scenarios on remote runners. These runners operate as virtual browsers, executing actions in alignment with the W3C
WebDriver standard. They simulate user activity and collect performance data in a consistent, repeatable manner.
This approach allows organisations to proactively monitor application behaviour, detect performance deviations, and validate system responsiveness—without relying on real-time user traffic.
The following flowchart illustrates how this works:
