# Checkly Synthetic Monitoring

**Source**: https://www.checklyhq.com/product/synthetic-monitoring/

> Monitor every complex workflow like your business depends on it. Uptime monitoring tells you a server responded. Synthetic monitoring tells you the login button worked, checkout completed, and the API returned the right data.

Checkly Synthetic Monitoring replicates real user flows across browser and API, continuously, from 22+ global locations. It is built natively on Playwright, so the same tests your developers already write can run in production as monitors.

## What it does

- **Browser Checks**: Run real browser tests against your production UI. Click buttons, fill forms, and complete checkout flows to catch broken UI flows and regressions before users do.
- **API Checks**: Validate backend layers with assertions on status codes, payloads, and response times. Chain API calls to test complete workflows: authenticate, create, verify, clean up.
- **Native Playwright**: The same tests your developers already write, running in production, using the standard Playwright API with no vendor lock-in.
- **Monitoring as Code**: Define monitors in code and deploy them from CI/CD. Version-control your monitors and ship them with the Checkly CLI, Terraform, or Pulumi.
- **Debug & Resolve**: Every failed check captures screenshots, video replay, Playwright traces, console logs, and network requests.
- **Rocky AI Root Cause Analysis**: Traces, logs, and screenshots are analyzed into a plain-language root cause on every failed run.
- **Alerting**: Alerts route through Slack, PagerDuty, email, or webhooks with full context, including screenshots and traces.
- **Status Pages**: Auto-open incidents and notify subscribers the moment a check fails. No manual updates.

## Key facts

- Runs from **22+ global locations**.
- **API Checks** run as frequently as every **10 seconds**.
- **Browser Checks** and **Multistep Checks** support intervals down to every **1 minute**.
- All check types can be triggered on demand via CLI, API, or CI/CD.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What's the difference between synthetic monitoring and uptime monitoring?
Uptime monitoring checks whether a URL or TCP port responds. It answers "is it up?". Synthetic monitoring goes further: it simulates real user actions (clicking buttons, filling forms, calling APIs with real payloads) to answer "does it actually work?".

### What check types does Checkly offer for synthetic monitoring?
Checkly has four check types in two categories. Browser-level: Browser Checks run Playwright scripts against your UI; Playwright Check Suites port your entire test project to production as a continuous monitor. API-level: API Checks assert on endpoint responses (status, payload, response time); Multistep Checks chain API calls to test complete backend workflows.

### Do I need to write new tests, or can I reuse what I already have?
If your team uses Playwright, you can import your existing test suite directly as a Playwright Check Suite: custom dependencies, shared fixtures, StorageState, and all.

### How often can synthetic checks run?
API Checks can run as frequently as every 10 seconds. Browser Checks and Multistep Checks support intervals down to every 1 minute. All check types can also be triggered on demand via CLI, API, or CI/CD.

### What happens when a synthetic check fails?
Checkly immediately captures a full screenshot, video replay, Playwright trace, console logs, and network requests. Rocky AI analyzes the failure and returns a plain-language root cause summary. Alerts fire instantly to Slack, PagerDuty, email, or any webhook.

### Can I monitor apps behind a firewall or in a private network?
Yes. Private Locations let you deploy a lightweight Checkly agent inside your own infrastructure: VPCs, staging environments, or on-premises networks.

## Related

- [Synthetic Monitoring (full page)](https://www.checklyhq.com/product/synthetic-monitoring/)
- [API Monitoring](https://www.checklyhq.com/product/api-monitoring/)
- [Uptime Monitoring](https://www.checklyhq.com/product/uptime-monitoring/)
- [Traces](https://www.checklyhq.com/product/traces/)
- [Pricing](https://www.checklyhq.com/pricing/)
- [Docs](https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/)
- [Start for free](https://app.checklyhq.com/signup/)