Types of synthetic monitors

Synthetic monitoring is about proactively simulating user visits, regardless of whether or not users are currently visiting your site. DESK Synthetic Monitoring provides you with 24x7 global visibility into your applications. An HTTP monitor uses simple HTTP requests. A browser monitor involves much more—it drives real web browser sessions with full HTML5/AJAX support.

DESK offers three types of synthetic monitoring: single-URL browser monitors, browser clickpaths, and HTTP monitors.

Single-URL browser monitors

A single-URL browser monitor is the equivalent of a simulated user visiting your application using a modern, updated web browser. Browser monitors can be configured to run from any of our global locations at frequencies of up to every 5 minutes. Browser monitors alert you when your application becomes inaccessible or when baseline performance degrades significantly.

Browser clickpaths

Browser clickpaths are simulated user visits that monitor your application’s business critical workflows. You can use the DESK recorder to record an exact sequence of clicks and user input that you are interested in monitoring for availability and performance. Once you’ve captured the mouse clicks and additional user actions that you want your browser clickpath to include, you can set your browser clickpath to run automatically at regular intervals to test your site’s availability and functionality.

HTTP monitors

An HTTP monitor is a simple HTTP request. You can use it to check if your website or API endpoint is available. As with browser monitors, HTTP monitors run automatically at regular intervals. HTTP monitors are executed by an ActiveGate and require a special ActiveGate configuration. With this configuration, you can also use HTTP monitors to check the availability of your internal resources that are inaccessible from outside your network.

Supported browsers

The supported browsers for each synthetic feature are included in the following table.

Feature	Support
Recorder	Google Chrome (latest version, backwards compatible)
Browser monitor	Google Chrome 75

Note: See Browser monitors in private locations for Chromium versions you should install on a synthetic-enabled ACtiveGate running private browser monitors.