The Difference Between Synthetic API Monitoring and API Real User Monitoring

API creators face the common challenge of effective monitoring to gain insights into their APIs' health, performance, and usage, with two primary approaches being synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM). Synthetic monitoring, also known as active monitoring, involves sending synthetic requests to the API to proactively identify potential issues before they affect real clients, though it may not account for unanticipated client behaviors and can be costly. In contrast, real user monitoring, or passive monitoring, tracks actual client requests to detect real-time issues, offering valuable insights for dynamic applications but requiring active traffic to gather data. A comprehensive monitoring strategy benefits from combining both methods, utilizing synthetic monitoring to preemptively identify issues and RUM for real-time problem detection and analysis, thus providing a robust solution for monitoring API performance and user experience.