Comparison
Synthetic monitoringvsTime to detect
Synthetic monitoring
you run a scripted fake user journey every minute so you find out the checkout is broken before a customer tells you.
Actively probing your system from outside on a schedule. It covers the gap where real traffic is low or where a failure prevents traffic from arriving at all. It only tests the paths you scripted, so it complements real user measurement rather than replacing it.
Full entry →Time to detect
the errors started at 09:02 and the first alert fired at 09:41, and a customer had emailed at 09:12.
How long a failure lasted before anyone knew about it. It is the part of an incident timeline most likely to be embarrassing and most likely to be improvable, since it is a monitoring problem rather than a hard engineering one. A review that only examines what happened after the page is skipping the segment where the cheapest minutes are usually available.
Full entry →