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The widespread move to Cloud computing and use of SaaS tools stimulated the need for synthetic monitoring that emulates end-user transactions using behavioral scripts.
External web performance monitoring tools utilize agents to simulate user activity on a given URL. These tools are also known as Active Monitoring Tools (as they actively simulate transactions) or Synthetic Monitoring Tools. Synthetic Monitoring Solutions rely on browser emulators or actual automated browsers to execute HTTP activity, in others words, to request URLs or load webpages. In both cases the synthetic agent sees the transaction from the perspective of the client (requester) and often does not have the perspective of the server/application. On the other side Real User Monitoring devices, also known as Passive Monitoring Tools, get the perspective from your datacenter by gathering TCP packets at the switch/router inside the web-site datacenter. They monitor any activity to your servers and applications, and can gather Real User Performance data in regards to your application or content.
There are several key differences between the two:
When we started Catchpoint, we looked at both monitoring methods and decided to go with synthetic monitoring. The main reason for this was that we foresaw the widespread move to Cloud computing and use of SaaS tools, and that implementing Passive devices would be limited by this distribution of services. With Synthetic Monitoring you can monitor a webpage and anything referenced by it, including CDN, adservers, and any widgets. To mitigate the loss of actual end-user performance data, we then built Catchpoint Glimpse, which relies on JavaScript to collect Real User performance data from the user perspective. We brought the ability to overlay the data from the two monitors in one screen to correlate the Synthetic monitoring data from the backbone with that of the real users on the page, to understand the full performance impact in the end-user.
Catchpoint.