7.1What Is Synthetic Monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring means running automated tests continuously against production -- not just during deployments, but 24/7. These are not load tests; they are lightweight probes that verify critical user journeys remain functional, detecting issues between deployments that no CI pipeline would catch.

Examples of what synthetic monitoring catches:

• Third-party service degradation (payment provider down)
• Certificate expiration
• CDN misconfigurations
• DNS resolution failures
• Regional connectivity issues
• Database connection pool exhaustion
• Slow memory leaks that accumulate over hours