Synthetic Monitoring: What It Is, How It Works, and Key Use Cases

Table of contents

What is Synthetic Monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring, an integral part of application performance management, is designed to emulate user interactions with digital services. This proactive performance monitoring technique uses scripts to simulate user behavior across diverse scenarios, environments, and device types. Synthetic tests generate virtual user requests that replicate real-world interactions, which enables the analysis of key performance indicators such as application response time and resource availability.

Kentik in brief: Kentik is a network intelligence platform that includes Kentik Synthetics, a fully integrated synthetic monitoring solution. Run continuous ping, traceroute, HTTP, DNS, page load, and transaction tests from a global network of public agents and customer-deployed private agents. Because synthetic results are stored alongside real traffic flow data, teams can correlate test failures with actual user-traffic shifts to triage issues faster.

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Synthetic Monitoring at a Glance

What it is: A proactive testing method that uses scripted simulations to measure the performance, availability, and responsiveness of applications, APIs, and network services — before real users are affected.
How it works: Automated agents deployed globally run periodic tests (ping, traceroute, HTTP, DNS, page load, transaction scripts) against target resources and report metrics like latency, jitter, packet loss, and uptime.
Why it matters: It catches performance degradations and outages before end users notice them, validates SLA compliance, and establishes performance baselines across geographies and network paths.
Active vs. passive: Synthetic monitoring is active (proactive simulation). Real User Monitoring (RUM) is passive (observing actual user traffic). The two are complementary.
Key use cases: Web/app performance testing, API monitoring, DNS monitoring, page load testing, transaction monitoring, BGP route monitoring, SaaS availability tracking, and inter-/intra-cloud performance validation.

The primary advantages of synthetic monitoring include:

Application Performance Analysis: Synthetic monitoring provides crucial insights into an application’s performance, helping identify areas for improvement.
Uptime and User Experience Tracking: This method continuously monitors application uptime, analyzing how applications respond to typical user behaviors.
Focused Business Transaction Monitoring: Synthetic monitoring can help pinpoint issues within specific business transactions, such as challenges encountered during online purchases or form submissions.

Unlike passive monitoring methods like network flow or packet capture, synthetic monitoring proactively gauges the health and performance of network resources, applications, and services. As part of the evolving fields of Network Performance Monitoring and Digital Experience Monitoring, it is critical in enabling IT development, NetOps, and DevOps teams to improve user experiences and optimize business-critical functions.

How Does Synthetic Monitoring Fit into the Broader Context of Network Monitoring?

Network monitoring consists of three key areas — often called “pillars” — that together provide a comprehensive view of network performance, health, and user experience. Synthetic monitoring is one of them:

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA): Often referred to as network flow analysis, NTA is the passive monitoring of actual traffic flowing across the network. It provides detailed insights into real-world network usage using flow records (such as NetFlow, VPC flow logs, and packet traces via Deep Packet Inspection) to understand network performance metrics.
Synthetic Monitoring: Synthetic monitoring (or synthetic testing) is a part of Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) and involves proactive testing of network functions to simulate actual user experiences. It’s a forward-looking approach that anticipates issues before they impact users.
Network Infrastructure Metrics: Infrastructure metrics collected by a Network Monitoring System (NMS) focus on the health and activity of network infrastructure devices like servers, network nodes, and storage nodes. These metrics are gathered via methods like SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and Streaming Telemetry.

A modern network intelligence platform integrates all three pillars so that teams can correlate insights across real traffic, synthetic test results, and infrastructure health — rather than managing each in isolation.

How Does Synthetic Monitoring Work?

Synthetic monitoring works by creating and executing scripted or pre-defined tests that simulate real user interactions with an application or service. This process involves:

Developing test scripts: Design scripts that mimic common user behaviors and actions, such as clicking buttons, filling out forms, or navigating the application.
Generating traffic types: Simulate various network conditions by generating diverse traffic types, including network, DNS, HTTP, and web traffic.
Targeting specific resources: Direct the generated traffic to particular targets, such as IP addresses, servers, hosts, or web pages.
Measuring performance metrics: Collect data on response times, availability, and other relevant metrics during the test.
Establishing KPIs: Analyze the collected data to build key performance indicators (KPIs) for monitoring and optimizing the application or service’s performance.

Synthetic tests are automated and periodic, performed at regular intervals to ensure continuous monitoring of application or service performance. Advanced synthetic monitoring solutions, like Kentik Synthetics, can execute tests at sub-one-minute intervals for more accurate insights and real-time performance monitoring.

Synthetic Monitoring: Types of synthetic tests

Synthetic Monitoring: Screenshot from Kentik Synthetics illustrating the wide variety of synthetic tests that can be configured. Kentik Synthetics provides continuous active testing with ping, traceroute, HTTP, DNS and transaction tests from a global network of public agents and private agents you deploy, so you can continuously measure reachability, latency and packet loss across key paths.

When researching synthetic monitoring, the related topic of passive “Real User Monitoring” (RUM) will likely turn up. Real User Monitoring involves capturing and analyzing each user transaction/interaction with an application. The idea is to track and monitor the actual usage of an application and record what happened (after the fact). In contrast to synthetic monitoring, RUM is a form of passive monitoring.

Active vs. Passive Monitoring: Synthetic and Real User Monitoring

It’s not a matter of which is better. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Here are a couple of short definitions for both of these terms as they pertain to monitoring:

Active: A proactive test simulates a user by accessing a resource, waiting for a response, and interpreting any results from the communication. Synthetic monitoring is a form of active monitoring. A network management station that polls devices on a network is also an active monitor.
Passive: Passive monitoring reactively monitors actual/authentic user interactions with a resource and then measures and interprets the communications. Real user monitoring is a form of passive monitoring. Placing a packet analyzer on the network and observing traffic is also a form of passive monitoring.

Both active and passive monitoring are helpful and, while they are alternatives, combining both enables improvements and optimizations in the end-user digital experience.

(For a more detailed comparison of Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring, see ”Synthetic Monitoring vs Real User Monitoring”.)

The Goal of Synthetic Monitoring

On the surface, the goal of active synthetic monitoring is to ensure that an application or service (e.g., web page, DNS) is up and responding to actual end users in a timely manner. It can answer questions such as:

Is the DNS responding to end users in under 50 milliseconds?
Is the website up and loading in under 1500 milliseconds?
Are shopping cart transactions working?
Are API endpoints available and responding in the expected manner?

To accomplish this, the synthetic transaction monitor generally measures two things:

The availability of the resource over time (e.g., 99.999% up-time)
The responsiveness in milliseconds of the resource over time

This reliable routine operation can provide more details than the above implies. Trending and alerting also play significant roles in this topic. These details are discussed in more detail below. (See also: “What is Synthetic Transaction Monitoring?” for more detail about monitoring specific web transactions that result from user actions in a site or web application.)

Types of Synthetic Monitoring: Use Cases

Synthetic monitoring solutions (such as Kentik Synthetics) offer a wide range of use cases that extend beyond traditional network performance monitoring, encompassing web application monitoring, user experience improvement, and more. These use cases serve customer segments including service providers, corporate IT, and digital businesses, each with unique monitoring needs.

Web/Application Performance Monitoring

Synthetic monitoring enables web application developers and operations professionals to better understand web application availability, API performance, and user experience. The availability and proper operation of GET, HEAD, PATCH, POST, and PUT methods for various API endpoints can be ensured using HTTP-based synthetic tests. The availability of an endpoint and its HTTP response status codes (e.g., ensuring that authentication is working as expected) can be monitored. Other metrics such as average time to last byte, size of the response, etc. can also be measured.

These capabilities are crucial for maintaining optimal performance and identifying potential issues in real time.

Additionally, synthetic tests can be used to analyze and alert on application network health and performance metrics such as ping latency, jitter, packet loss, HTTP latency, and certificate expiry. Solutions like Kentik also allow automatically running traceroute tests to understand metrics such as the maximum number of hops between various network destinations.

Synthetic Monitoring: Route view of results of an automated traceroute test

Synthetic Monitoring: Route view of the results of an automated traceroute test in Kentik

Page Load Testing

Page load speed is an essential component of user experience in web applications. Synthetic tests can be used to automatically and periodically test load times for various web application pages. These tests can provide a granular breakdown of how every component on the page is loading. Using that information, web app developers can easily track down precisely what’s impacting a site’s performance — whether it’s a site hosted on-premises, in the cloud, or by a SaaS provider.

Kentik’s page load testing goes beyond basic load time analysis. It uses Headless Chromium, run by Kentik app agents, to perform a full browser page load test. This approach provides a granular breakdown of the loading process for each component on a page, offering invaluable data for web developers to pinpoint performance bottlenecks.

For a short video overview of how page load testing works, see ”Solving Slow Web Applications with the Kentik Synthetics Page Load Test“.

Transaction Monitoring

In addition to testing the basic response/loading behavior of a website, network service, or application, synthetic monitoring can simulate a user’s interactions with a web application. A “transaction” in this context is a series of actions that a user might take (e.g., logging in, searching for some product, adding that product to a shopping cart, and checking out).

After creating a clickpath script or recording a clickpath representing the transaction, remote agents can replay that script (simulating the user requests) to test the performance and availability of the various steps and collect performance data about the transaction.

In Kentik, transaction tests are driven by a Google Puppeteer script (created using the Recorder tab in Chrome Developer Tools) executed by an agent running Headless Chromium. The results include the health status and total transaction time for each agent, and can show any screenshots that the script creator specified as actions in the script.

Learn more about this topic in our article, “What is Synthetic Transaction Monitoring?”

API Monitoring

Though it’s a special case of web application monitoring, it’s worth mentioning that synthetic monitoring can be used to automatically test the availability and proper operation of any REST API (a collection of API endpoints) or an individual API endpoint. The availability and proper operation of GET, HEAD, PATCH, POST, and PUT methods can be tested. In Kentik Synthetics, ping, traceroute, and BGP (border gateway protocol) data can also be collected alongside API tests.

Network and Routing Tests

Synthetic monitoring can also be used to monitor network performance to IP addresses, hostnames, and mission-critical SaaS services or to set up tests between agents themselves. This includes agent-to-agent mesh tests that measure latency, jitter, and packet loss across every combination of agents in the mesh — useful for validating inter-cloud and intra-cloud connectivity.

Enhanced BGP Monitoring

Synthetic monitoring tools with BGP monitoring capabilities can provide alerts on route leaks and hijacks. These features are essential for maintaining the integrity and security of data paths across the internet, ensuring reliable and secure connectivity. Kentik’s BGP monitoring collects route data from thousands of vantage points and can detect invalid RPKI status, upstream leaks, and origin hijacks. (See also: BGP Route Monitoring.)

Synthetic monitoring can be used to prevent BGP hijacking

Using synthetic tests to monitor BGP can prevent route leaks and BGP hijacks

Autonomous (Automated) Testing and Test Configuration

One of the challenges with synthetic monitoring is the operational overhead of configuring and maintaining tests as networks change. Advanced platforms address this by automating test configuration using insights from actual network traffic.

Kentik’s autonomous testing feature intelligently leverages your network’s traffic data (provided by data sources such as NetFlow) to automatically generate tests toward the most frequent network sources and destinations. By analyzing flow records along with correlated network traffic data (such as SNMP, BGP, GeoIP, etc.), the platform can automatically select IP addresses to test from or toward. Types of tests that can be automatically configured include ASN tests, CDN tests, and tests to and from various geographic locations. This proactive approach ensures that tests are continually refined and relevant to current network conditions, allowing NetOps to focus on critical performance indicators without manual intervention.

DNS Server Monitoring

Synthetic monitoring can also be used to measure the availability and responsiveness of DNS Servers or to verify the DNSSEC keychain. In this application, tests report on the performance of one or more DNS servers associated with a hostname, showing the address resolution time and the resulting IP address provided by those servers.

Real-Time Alerts and AI-Assisted Troubleshooting

Modern synthetic monitoring platforms offer real-time alerts when tests fail or breach performance thresholds, enabling network teams to quickly identify and address performance issues as they occur. Kentik’s platform extends this with AI-driven insights through Kentik AI Advisor, which can help teams rapidly interpret synthetic test results, correlate them with other network data, and pinpoint root causes.

Monitoring SaaS and Global Availability

With synthetic monitoring, you can run scheduled tests to SaaS endpoints from agents distributed globally, tracking availability, response time, and error rates from different regions so you can quickly detect regional SaaS issues before users complain.

Kentik’s State of the Internet feature goes a step further: it provides at-a-glance visibility into the health, performance, and availability of common public SaaS applications, public cloud inter-region connectivity, and DNS service providers — all without consuming any of your test credits. This built-in dashboard lets every Kentik customer see the current state of popular services like Zoom, Office 365, and Slack from a global perspective.

Synthetic Monitoring and Real Traffic Correlation

One of the most valuable capabilities in synthetic monitoring is the ability to correlate synthetic test results with real network traffic data. When synthetic tests and flow/telemetry data live in the same platform, you can pivot from a failing test directly into traffic views to see whether user flows dropped, shifted, or degraded at the same time — giving full context for triaging synthetic alerts.

Synthetic Monitoring Use Cases Across Customer Segments

Synthetic monitoring solutions serve the diverse needs of various customer segments:

Network Service Providers: Use synthetic monitoring to test network performance autonomously and uphold SLAs. Autonomous ASN and CDN tests help providers assess and maintain service quality.
Corporate IT Departments: Employ synthetic tests to monitor public cloud and hybrid cloud connectivity, ensuring a robust digital user experience. This includes testing from internal servers to cloud-based resources across hybrid infrastructures.
Digital Businesses: Use synthetic monitoring for comprehensive SaaS app tests, API monitoring, and transaction monitoring to optimize user experience and application performance. For eCommerce, SaaS, and FinTech, this means testing critical business transactions like purchase processes and user interactions.

Geographic Distribution of Synthetic Tests

Connections to online resources might originate from anywhere in the world. This means we can’t monitor a cloud-hosted resource for availability and responsiveness from just a single location. Synthetic tests typically measure from multiple, geographically diverse locations, using testing agents located in different data centers worldwide.

Kentik has built out a global network of synthetic testing agents that customers use to verify performance levels of all major public or private cloud-based applications and SaaS applications. These agents are located inside Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Alibaba Cloud, and IBM Cloud, as well as in data centers at key internet hubs worldwide. Customers can also easily deploy private agents in their own geographically diverse data centers, branch offices, and cloud VPCs.

Synthetic Monitoring: Map of globally distributed synthetic test agents in Kentik

Kentik lets you deploy private agents in your data centers or VPCs and combine them with global public agents, so you can test application reachability and performance from both inside your environment and from external internet vantage points.

With numerous network and infrastructure elements that need to be tested and a user population that is geographically dispersed, the number of testing combinations can grow very large. To manage this complexity, Kentik makes it easy to set up multi-site performance mesh tests with just a few clicks — for example, creating a testing mesh between multiple AWS regions, or between your data centers and public cloud regions.

The following video demonstrates the easy configuration of a synthetic testing “mesh” between a variety of cloud services:

The other thing that you can do from here is, you know, if you say that this is cool, I like seeing performance between regions of AWS, but it's not quite solving a specific use case I have, which might be testing from my data center to AWS specific regions. So doing that is really easy as well. There's a little clone button here that you can hit or a copy button. And what this is doing now is it's automatically creating a copy of this test. So it says AWS Cloud Mesh copy. It's showing me all the agents that are part of this test, which are basically representative of cloud regions. And then from here, what I can do is I can say, I don't really care about testing performance from London. I don't care about testing performance from Paris. I don't care about Tokyo and Sydney either, so I'm going to take those out. I do care about the regions that are in the US, but in addition to that, I want to test performance from my own data centers. So what I did here is I hit Edit Agents and that has brought up this view that is showing me all the agents that I have access to. So these are the various synthetic agents that are available and accessible to me, and they're broadly of two types. There are private agents, which are agents that I have installed within my data center, and there are global agents, which Kentik has provided me out of the box installed in various locations across the world. So these global agents are a combination of agents running in public clouds as well as in various data center providers and service provider networks. So what I can do from here is I can say, I'm gonna go ahead and pick the Acme data center. I'm gonna choose all four of their sites represented by these agents and I'm gonna hit save. So notice that now all these agents are added to this list of agents, and while I'm doing this, I'm going to also go ahead and rename this to call it demo, I'll just call it demo webinar AWS mesh, and then I can optionally choose to configure notifications for this. I'm going to say go ahead and email me whenever this alerts, and within the advanced options here, there's a bunch of other things that I can do. So first off, I can choose to test every minute, which is the default, but if I really want to be cranking this up, I can go all the way down to every second or I can go down slower to every five minutes. So I'm gonna go ahead and leave that to every minute for now. I can choose to test either v4 or v six or both, so if I only wanted to test v six, I can do that here. If all of these IPs or these agents were within my data centers, I can optionally choose to test using local IPs rather than public IPs, so that way I'm just using the private IPs and it's testing all within my networks. Turning that on, we'll do that. There are options here for configuring when an alert should be triggered. So in this case, we're going to test between each of these agents to every other agent, so it's going to go ahead and create a whole bunch of tests for me, and we refer to these as subtests under the main test. So this threshold essentially governs how many of these subtests should be failing before the entire test is failing. And then there's thresholds that you can configure for latency, packet loss, and jitter. So if you have a specific use case where you don't care as much about jitter, you care about packet loss and latency, you can set these thresholds lower and this threshold higher, so that way you're not generating a lot of noise for yourself. Some of the options there. Similarly, options for alerting. You can decide how often you get alerted based on how often a given test is failing and how many times in the last one hour and so on and so forth. There are also options that let you control the types of packets that we send out. So, broadly send out two types of packets for each of our tests. We send ping packets and we send trace packets that are used to construct a trace route that I'll show you. And for each of these, you get to control how many probes are sent out, right? So by default, we'll send five ping probes. So in this case, if I'm testing every minute and I'm sending five probes, that will be five probes every minute and we'll compute an average based on those five probes. But you have the option of dialing that up or dialing that down. You can also choose what protocol you want to use. So by default, we'll send ICMP packets and look at ICMP echo responses, but you have the option of choosing TCP, and if you did that, you can specify a target port. By default, we'll do four forty three, but you can choose any custom port that you like, And we'll send a TCP SYN and expect a TCP SYN plus ACK or a TCP RST in response. And this is really key because if you know that your end hosts are going to be blocking ICMP, you can use TCP and make your test more reliable. Similar options on the trace side, you can adjust the number of probes as well as the protocol between UDP and TCP here. So that's just an example of how you can set these tests up. So now I'm going to go ahead and hit Save and Start here. It takes a couple of minutes for the test to get queued up and start sending us data. So what I did is I actually created a mirror test similar to the one that I just created. I'm going to filter down the custom meshes here. So this is basically a quick filter showing me all the types of tests that I've configured. So I'm going to say only show me my custom meshes. So this is the test I just created, but I actually created a test in advance that is sort of exactly the same as this, so I'm going to go ahead and click on that to show you what that looks like. So this is, again, a customized mesh that started with the AWS mesh and added a bunch of Acme server agents to it, so now it's got a combination of AWS agents as well as Acme server agents.

This video is a brief excerpt from “How to Continuously Monitor Inter- and Intra-Cloud Performance” — you can watch the entire presentation here.

Why Synthetic Monitoring is Important

Reputation and service level agreement validation are two big reasons why staying ahead of performance issues is a must. It’s straightforward — poor connections can lead to unhappy customers and declining revenue. The sooner NetOps can detect an availability issue, the faster they can react.

Many users today see excessive application latency as a form of outage. Understanding and monitoring when a critical service drops below a minimum level of performance is paramount. A global network of agents that allows for omnidirectional synthetic transaction monitoring is one of the best ways to ensure that all users, regardless of physical location, are experiencing an acceptable level of service.

Some of the most prominent benefits of synthetic monitoring include:

Performance Validation

Using synthetic monitoring, organizations can continuously validate the performance of network, web, and application components, track changes over time, and be alerted to anomalies or problems before they impact the experience of actual end-users.

Establish Baseline Benchmarks

Continually testing various components of a network or application can establish a baseline for expected behavior under normal conditions. Having set baseline metrics, operations personnel can be alerted when the performance of any particular component drops below an acceptable threshold.

User-specific Testing

Synthetic monitoring can be used to perform tests from the perspective of specific users by their role (e.g., a logged-in user, a logged-out user, an admin user, etc.) or by geographic location, helping to ensure system performance in a global sense (both literally and metaphorically).

Proactive Performance Management

By identifying and proactively addressing network and application issues, synthetic monitoring helps reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), enhancing overall operational efficiency. For organizations reliant on third-party services, synthetic monitoring also ensures those providers meet agreed-upon standards and SLAs.

Cost Considerations in Synthetic Monitoring Tools

Synthetic monitoring can be costly depending on several factors: the scale and frequency of testing, the number and location of monitoring agents, the complexity of simulated transactions, data storage and analysis volumes, tool licensing models, and maintenance/training overhead. Businesses need to balance the cost against their monitoring needs.

Flexible, scalable solutions help manage these costs. Kentik’s approach to synthetic monitoring pricing includes predictable, credit-based pricing that allows network teams to run more tests at a lower cost than many competing tools. The Kentik management console automatically calculates the number of credits needed per test and alerts you ahead of time if you may be running out of credits. Kentik customers receive monthly credits with their plans, and additional credits are available by purchasing a SyntheticPak. The platform also includes advanced capabilities such as AI-driven analysis and autonomous test configuration, providing more insight and value without necessitating investment in multiple separate tools.

Synthetic Monitoring: Synthetics dashboard in Kentik showing test results and mesh tests

FAQs about Synthetic Monitoring

What is the difference between synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring uses scripted, simulated tests to proactively measure application and network performance — it doesn’t depend on real users being active. Real user monitoring (RUM), by contrast, passively captures and analyzes actual user interactions as they happen. Synthetic monitoring is best for proactive detection and baseline benchmarking, while RUM excels at understanding the real-world experience of actual users. Most organizations benefit from combining both approaches.

What are the main types of synthetic monitoring tests?

The most common test types are ping and traceroute (for network reachability and path analysis), HTTP/API tests (for web application and endpoint availability), DNS tests (for name resolution performance), page load tests (for full browser rendering performance), and transaction tests (for multi-step user journeys like login-to-checkout flows). Advanced platforms also support BGP route monitoring and agent-to-agent mesh tests.

How does synthetic monitoring help with SLA compliance?

Synthetic monitoring provides continuous, measurable data on availability, latency, packet loss, and other performance metrics — exactly the indicators most SLAs are built around. By establishing performance baselines and alerting on threshold breaches, teams can demonstrate compliance to customers and quickly identify when a third-party provider or internal service is falling short of agreed standards.

What tools can continuously test network performance with synthetic probes?

Most synthetic monitoring platforms offer continuous probing using tests like ping, traceroute, HTTP, DNS, and scripted transactions, run from globally distributed agents on a set schedule. The key differentiators are how tightly test results integrate with other network data and how much configuration can be automated. Kentik supports this through Kentik Synthetics — part of the Kentik Network Intelligence Platform — which runs continuous probes from both global public agents and private agents deployed in-house, with results automatically correlated against real traffic data.

How can I test application reachability from private and public agents?

Use public (or “global”) agents for internet-wide reachability checks that emulate end-user experience, and deploy private agents inside data centers, branches, or cloud VPCs to test internal or hybrid connectivity. Running the same tests from both vantage points helps you quickly isolate whether an issue is on the internet path or inside your own network. Kentik supports both agent types, letting you run ping, traceroute, HTTP, DNS, and API tests from either perspective within a single platform.

How can I test DNS, TLS, and HTTP performance from global agents?

Run web- and application-layer synthetic tests from agents distributed across multiple internet cities and cloud regions. These tests can measure DNS resolution times, HTTP responsiveness and status codes, TLS handshake latency, and certificate validity — and alert when thresholds are breached or behavior deviates from baseline. Kentik Synthetics supports all of these test types from its global agent network, with the option to add private agents for inside-out testing.

How do I correlate synthetic monitoring results with real user traffic?

When synthetic test results and real network traffic data are stored in the same platform, you can overlay them directly. Kentik’s unified data model lets you pivot from a synthetic test showing a problem (latency, packet loss, jitter) straight into real flow data to see whether actual users or services were affected at the same time — giving full context for troubleshooting.

How can I simulate user journeys over different network paths?

Deploy synthetic agents at different network locations — across cloud regions, data center sites, branch offices, and ISP vantage points — to test the same user journey from each. Transaction tests (which replay scripted multi-step user flows) combined with traceroute data reveal how different network paths affect the end-to-end experience. This helps identify path-specific bottlenecks like slow ISP segments or suboptimal cloud routing.

How can I alert on degraded performance before users are impacted?

Define performance thresholds for latency, loss, jitter, and availability, then monitor them continuously with synthetic tests. When metrics cross those thresholds, the platform raises alerts so you can detect and respond to performance regressions before users report issues. Kentik Synthetics supports continuous testing from public and private agents with integrated alerting on any test health change.

How do I set SLOs for network performance and track compliance?

Define SLO targets for metrics like latency, packet loss, jitter, and availability, then configure synthetic tests to monitor them continuously and alert on violations. Time-based dashboards that show test health over hours, days, or weeks make it straightforward to demonstrate compliance or identify trends. Kentik Synthetics supports this by letting you set health thresholds per test and track compliance through the Synthetics Dashboard and Test Control Center.

Proactively monitor network and application performance with Kentik

Kentik is the network intelligence platform that turns synthetic test results into answers — not just “is it up,” but what’s degraded, where the problem is, and whether real users are affected.

Get a demo — See how Kentik monitors application and network performance across hybrid environments
Kentik Synthetics — Continuous active testing with ping, traceroute, HTTP, DNS, page load, and transaction tests
Kentik Global Synthetic Network — Hundreds of agents across AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, and key internet hubs worldwide
Digital Experience Monitoring — Ensure optimal end-user experience across SaaS, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure
Kentik AI Advisor — Investigate synthetic test failures and performance anomalies with natural language

Updated: April 10, 2026