Building a Simple Synthetic Monitor With OpenTelemetry

Synthetic monitoring involves creating artificial interactions with a system to assess its functionality and response times, providing insight into both uptime and customer experience. The approach can complement Real User Monitoring (RUM) by offering consistency, as it eliminates variables like user connectivity and browser differences. The text discusses building a synthetic monitor using OpenTelemetry, .NET, and Azure functions, highlighting the importance of monitoring complex interactions rather than just endpoint availability. By leveraging functions-as-a-service solutions such as Azure Functions and AWS Lambda, developers can deploy highly configurable monitoring systems that run checks from multiple locations, enhancing the reliability of alerts and service level objectives (SLOs). The article emphasizes the importance of running these synthetic checks from different cloud providers than the application itself to better simulate real user experiences, suggesting even using home connections for more diverse insights.