Synthetic monitoring
A robot that regularly uses your production site or API so broken user journeys are found before a real customer reports them.
See it
What it is
Synthetic monitoring runs scripted probes or browser journeys against a live system on a schedule. Unlike real user monitoring, it does not wait for a customer to visit. A Checkly Playwright check, for example, can log in, search, and verify a critical page from several locations every few minutes.
Reach for it when a green server health check is not enough. Use it for the small set of paths that must work end to end, such as sign-in, search, checkout, or an API write followed by a read. Run simple probes often and longer browser journeys less often.
Gotcha: production journeys can create real side effects and brittle selectors can page people for a harmless copy change. Give robots a dedicated tenant, make writes reversible, mark their traffic, use role-based selectors, and alert only after repeated failures from more than one location.
Ask AI for it
Create a Checkly Browser Check with Playwright for the production login and checkout journey. Use a dedicated synthetic tenant, locate controls with getByRole, create a reversible test order, verify the confirmation page and API response, then cancel the order in cleanup. Run every five minutes from two Checkly locations, attach screenshots and traces on failure, retry once, and alert PagerDuty only when both locations fail. Tag requests with X-Synthetic-Test and exclude that traffic from product analytics.