Synthetic Monitoring vs. RUM: What Is Synthetic Monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring and Real User Monitoring (RUM) provide complementary perspectives on application reliability and user experience: synthetic checks proactively test predefined endpoints and browser flows on a schedule, while RUM records the performance, errors, Core Web Vitals, and sessions of actual visitors. Synthetic monitoring can detect outages, certificate expirations, broken internal services, and failed critical journeys before users encounter them, but it is limited to scripted paths and does not reflect the diversity or business impact of real-world usage. RUM captures authentic behavior across users’ devices, browsers, networks, and navigation paths, allowing teams to quantify affected sessions, analyze conversions, and replay bugs, but it cannot identify failures when there is no traffic or before customers are affected. The discussion argues that organizations should use both approaches, with synthetic monitoring answering whether services are available and RUM showing how failures and performance issues affect users. OpenObserve presents its platform as a unified implementation of both capabilities, supporting HTTP, TCP, TLS, SSH, and Playwright-based browser checks alongside SQL-queryable RUM data, session replay, logs, metrics, traces, shared alerting, and access controls.

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