Synthetic Monitoring Best Practices: What to Monitor and How Often

Short summary

Synthetic monitoring fails when teams monitor everything without discipline, generating noise instead of catching real failures. Prioritize critical paths where outages cause revenue loss or support tickets—authentication, checkout, third-party handoffs, core product actions. Run checks from multiple regions every 30 seconds for revenue paths, 1–5 minutes for secondary flows. Define checks as code, use confirmation-on-failure to suppress transient false positives, maintain isolated test accounts, and route alerts by severity.

• •Prioritize checks on revenue-critical paths with assertions beyond HTTP status codes
• •Run multi-region checks every 30s–5m based on impact, with confirmation-on-failure to reduce false positives
• •Define monitoring as code in version control with dedicated test accounts and severity-based alert routing

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