1 - Why Synthetics

Synthetics is one of the many products developed by New Relic and is used to simulates user behaviour.

This involves to look at the front-ends applications.

It allows to catch problems, (hopefully) before our customers do, using automated tests.

These tests can be run every given minutes/hours/days from different location around the world.

New Relic Synthetics can be configured to send alerts if specific conditions are met.

We configured New Relic to send these alerts via email as well as via posts on the Slack's Alerts channel.

2 - What to look for in Synthetics

Before going more into details you can see below what the synthetics dashboard of NR looks like.

How cool is that?

The colours on the left are pretty straight forward:

Green: All good, you can relax OR set your expectancy higher.
Orange: Oops, something is going wrong, you better check!
Red: NO SLEEP and NO FOOD for you: go and fix it now.

You can see at glance useful information such as the average response time on average for the requests, the success rate as well as your settings (Frequency, number of location).

3 - Monitor ping URL in Synthetics

You can add monitoring using the top right button. You will get the following page:

You will be able to choose which page you would like to test, the "schedule" (frequency of requests) you want. As a point of reference, at Maestrano, critical projects are configured for 1 minute and few minutes for the others.

Depending on the location of your users you will be able to monitor the country where these requests are sent.

Eg: A fronted for a company based in the UK could be tested from different location in Europe rather then testing it from Australia.

4 - To summarise

Configure New Relic Synthetics and get notifications if something goes wrong on your front-end(s).
Make sure to change your configuration depending on the results you get.
If nothing is going wrong you might do well OR your configuration might just not be setup correctly.

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