Applicare: synthetic monitoring

Applicare assists in synthetic monitoring by proactively simulating user interactions with your web applications to assess their performance and availability. Instead of waiting for real users to encounter issues, it runs automated checks at regular intervals to identify problems early.

Proactive Availability Checks
Synthetic transactions simulate user interactions even when no real users are active. It continuously tests your application's availability and performance, even during low-traffic periods. This helps you identify and fix issues like slow page loads or broken functionalities before they impact your actual users.

Flexible Script Options
Applicare goes beyond simple URL checks by supporting complex JMeter scripts. This allows you to simulate entire business workflows, such as a user logging in -> searching for a product -> adding it to a cart -> checking out. By using JMeter, you can perform multi-step transactions and validate that critical user journeys are working as expected.

Customizable Frequency & Scheduling
Monitoring intervals can be configured (e.g., every minute, hourly, or custom schedules) to balance between detailed visibility and resource usage.

Geographic Coverage
Synthetic checks can be executed from different locations to measure how users across geographies experience your application. This helps detect CDN, DNS, or network latency issues.

Detailed Performance Metrics
Applicare captures metrics like response time, throughput, error rates, and page load times for each synthetic run. This helps in benchmarking performance against internal SLAs or industry standards.

Integration with Business Transaction Monitoring
If Business Transaction Monitoring is enabled, synthetic transactions produce detailed call graphs and traces, helping pinpoint whether slowness comes from application code, DB queries, or infrastructure.

Historical Data & Trend Analysis
The tool provides historical performance data in the Synthetic User Experience. You can use this data to establish a performance baseline, track trends over time, and measure the impact of new code deployments or infrastructure changes. This helps in understanding and managing your application's performance

Early-Warning Alerts
Applicare raises alerts when synthetic transactions fail or exceed SLA thresholds. This ensures teams are notified immediately, even before users complain.

Validation of Fixes & Deployments
Synthetic tests can be run post-deployment to validate whether new code, configuration changes, or infrastructure upgrades have introduced performance regressions.