Table of contents
Welcome to the Tech Garden, a place where our monitoring tools, like to diverse flora, contribute to a thriving digital ecosystem. Our journey starts with the foundational roots of Application Performance Monitoring (APM), crucial for initial growth and stability, like the roots beneath our fruit trees.
As we nurture our complex ecosystem of microservices, external services, and dependencies, keeping track of the health of the system becomes a daunting task! Logs are fragmented and distributed, and APM tools can miss fundamental problems in the user experience. Synthetics are the bees of the tech garden. Visiting every service in turn, and asking fundamental questions about the health of the service, Synthetics know right away if something isn't working right.
When we imagine a garden we often like to imagine formal gardens like the one above, with every planting formally defined. Ironically, this kind of garden looks somehow 'simpler' than a chaotic jumble of plantings in most suburban back yards. But in reality these formal lines between living systems takes ten times the maintenance of a more naturalistic tangle. Formal gardens are much like the old-style monolithic codebases where every change must be managed as part of a whole. A modern microservice cluster is more like a re-wilding project with individual services allowed to grow as needed. If the microservice revolution started by saying 'pets not cattle' maybe the better term would be 'wildflowers, not hedges.' Synthetics are the 'spot checks' of a wild garden that let you know the system is still working and healthy despite being too complex to analyze at a high-level glance.
A re-wilding project at Trinity College Dublin has the look of a real microservice architecture: plants are allowed to interact wildly, to perform multiple roles in the overall system, and don't require nearly as much maintenance as a monoculture lawn. Synthetics in this analogy might be a gardener checking the depth and health of soil in a re-wilded lawn. As synthetics simulate what users experience with your service, so a gardener can just look at a variety of plants directly and see the overall health.
Why is Synthetic Monitoring indispensable in our tech garden?
- Increased Revenue: Like a garden's potential to yield an abundant harvest, synthetic monitoring ensures your digital ecosystem flourishes financially. Recall how a major online retailer experienced a $1.6 billion loss from just a one-second delay, underscoring the critical link between app performance and revenue growth.
- Brand and Reputation: In our garden, every user's experience is akin to a plant's health; a single negative encounter can lead 92% of users to abandon your digital garden, emphasizing the need for meticulous care and monitoring.
- Reduced IT Debt: Just as unchecked weeds can overrun a garden, unresolved app issues can escalate into costly IT tickets. In fact, 57% of people leave a brand because they're issue went unresolved. Synthetic monitoring helps alleviate that pain by preventing issues from happening in the first place. Forget reactive. Get proactive. Addressing problems proactively with synthetic monitoring can significantly reduce such debts, akin to regular garden maintenance preventing overrun.
- Increased Productivity: By catching issues early, teams can focus on cultivating other essential aspects of the application, enhancing overall productivity and innovation.
- DevOps Agility: Emphasizing early testing and intelligent execution, synthetic monitoring is integral to DevOps, promoting a culture of continuous improvement and responsiveness.
Synthetic Monitoring and other 'Quick Wins' for Operations and IT
When I search for information on Synthetic Monitoring and Testing, I often find results for synthetic fertilizer 😂. Ironically, while synthetic monitoring doesn't harm your system, it is similar to fertilizer as a quick, cheap, 'win' that can improve performance dramatically. With Checkly you can add sophisticated automated end-to-end testing to your whole service including capturing video of your service and visual regression testing.
Join us for the upcoming webinar, "Beyond APM: Cultivating a Thriving Monitoring Ecosystem," where we'll delve deeper into how synthetic monitoring can transform your digital environment, encouraging a proactive, growth-focused approach to application development and maintenance.
Let's roll up our sleeves and dive into the soil of technology, planting the seeds of future innovation to nurture a robust, flourishing digital ecosystem. Your expertise and curiosity are the sunlight and water driving our tech garden towards a vibrant, prosperous future.