Set up Splunk Synthetic Monitoring 🔗
Monitor the performance of your web pages and applications by running synthetic Browser, Uptime, and API tests. These tests let you proactively alert the relevant teams when a site or user flow they manage becomes unavailable, as well as report on the performance of a site or user flow over time.
Get started 🔗
Splunk Synthetic Monitoring does not require extensive installation and setup: you can get started by creating your first test directly in the Splunk Synthetic Monitoring user interface.
Follow these steps to familiarize yourself with each of the synthetic test types:
Set up your first Uptime test 🔗
To begin learning what you can do with Splunk Synthetic Monitoring, start by setting up a simple Uptime test. See Set up an Uptime test for instructions.
Learn more about Uptime tests 🔗
See Interpret Uptime test results to learn about the visualizations that Uptime tests capture.
See Uptime test metrics for a complete list of Uptime test metrics.
Set up your first Browser test 🔗
Once you’ve successfully created an Uptime test, set up a Browser test to run a synthetic check on a webpage. You can provide the URL to a webpage you manage, or you can start by testing the performance of another website you like to visit. See Set up a Browser test for instructions.
Learn more about Browser tests 🔗
See Interpret Browser Test results to learn about the visualizations that Browser tests capture.
See Browser test metrics for a complete list of Browser test metrics.
(Optional) Link Synthetic spans to APM spans 🔗
Linking Synthetic spans to APM spans enables you to follow the story of your data from front-end to back-end. Splunk Synthetics uses server timing to calculate the response time between the front end and back end of your application, and to join the front-end and back-end traces for end-to-end visibility.
If a span in Splunk Synthetics has an associated back-end span, an APM link appears next to the span in the waterfall view of run results page and opens the span details page in Splunk APM.
By default, the Splunk Distributions of OpenTelemetry already send the Server-Timing header. The header links spans from the browser with back-end spans and traces.
The APM environment variable for controlling the Server-Timing header is SPLUNK_TRACE_RESPONSE_HEADER_ENABLED=true. Set SPLUNK_TRACE_RESPONSE_HEADER_ENABLED=true to link to Splunk APM.
After you set the environment variable, your application instrumentation adds the following response headers to HTTP responses:
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Server-Timing
Server-Timing: traceparent;desc="00-<serverTraceId>-<serverSpanId>-01"
The Server-Timing header contains the traceId and spanId parameters in traceparent format. To learn more, see:
Server timing from the W3C documentation.
Traceparent header from the W3C documentation.
For more examples on Java instrumentation, see Server trace information.
(Optional) Integrate with Splunk RUM 🔗
Integrate with Splunk RUM so that you can automatically measure Web Vital metrics against your run results. Web vitals capture key metrics that affect user experience and assess the overall performance of your site. For more, see Splunk RUM metrics integration.
(Optional) Configure your application 🔗
If you use Splunk Synthetic Monitoring to monitor an application or website with allow/block lists or a web analytics tool, you might want to adjust the settings to accommodate traffic from Splunk Synthetic Monitoring. See Configure your site to accommodate synthetic tests for detailed instructions.
Continue learning 🔗
See Key concepts in Splunk Synthetic Monitoring to learn more about important terms and concepts in Splunk Synthetic Monitoring.