10 Best Synthetic Monitoring Tools In 2023

Freshping is a free website monitoring software. It provides detailed monitoring reports that help you make sense of website downtimes or performance issues at a glance.

Why I picked Freshping: It’s free and capable of helping you monitor HTTP/HTTPS URLs, web sockets, ICMP Ping, TCP, UDP, and DNS from 10 locations globally. With this tool, you enjoy the flexibility of receiving alerts through the channels that work for your team. You can configure Webhooks to build a customized notification channel that your team works with or that suits your business.

Freshping Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: Freshping provides detailed incident history and outage analysis reports. You don’t just get notified when changes happen, you also get to know where the performance issues lie and what exactly happened. This platform features status pages, which help you keep your customers informed about uptime and incidents. You can customize the status pages as you wish and display your website’s uptime history by embedding real-time Status Badges on a webpage.

Integrations include Freshdesk, Freshservice, Slack, Webhooks, Twilio, Freshstatus, Instatus, LeadMaster, Squadcast, Lightstep, and Zapier.

Pingdom helps you offer an exceptional user experience by providing real-time insight into your website's uptime and performance.

Why I picked Pingdom: Pingdom gives you access to fast and reliable outside-in monitoring capabilities you need to keep tabs on how your website is performing. It provides everything you need to test your website’s availability across countries, assess and optimize the loading speed of key pages, ensure frictionless site flows, and integrate with your favorite apps. 

You get alerted through email or SMS as soon as your website becomes unavailable, a transaction fails, or something else happens.

Pingdom Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: Pingdom helps you monitor webpage load times and provides detailed reports. With the reports, you can ascertain whether the slow loading speed is caused by the user’s device, network, or browser; or if your web components need to be optimized. The tool also has a developer-friendly API, which helps create new API queries within a short time with easy-to-use implementation.

Integrations include Slack, Rippling, Zapier, Pipefy, Grow, Klipfolio, Datadog, Office Chat, PagerDuty, and Talkspirit.

Zabbix, an open-source solution, provides a range of monitoring capabilities, including network, server, cloud, container, and database monitoring. It offers an all-in-one solution that helps you visualize or keep track of your whole IT infrastructure stack.

Why I picked Zabbix: This software stands out with business service monitoring. It helps you keep track of KPIs by providing visibility into your product’s performance. It comes with root cause analysis capability, which empowers you to detect where the problems lie so you can fix them quickly.

Zabbix uses automation solutions to offer high-performance problem detection in real-time. Its flexibility allows you to monitor whatever you want to ensure your customers’ user experience is optimal. When it comes to the security of your data, Zabbix lets you keep your sensitive information safe by saving it in an external vault.

Zabbix Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include container monitoring and data visualization. Zabbix provides the capabilities to monitor your Kubernetes cluster and other cloud-based assets. You can keep an eye on the health of your pods, nodes, and other Kubernetes components. The data visualization feature provides additional insights and higher observability. This gives you access to beautifully displayed metrics and reports in various formats.

Integrations: Zabbix integrates with a wide range of tools, such as Datadog, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, xMatters, iLert, ClusterControl, ONEiO, Galileo, and OverOps.

Better Stack is a synthetic monitoring system that lets you prevent downtime and performance issues by providing visibility into your stack. It comes with the capabilities you need to debug issues and resolve incidents reliably.

Why I picked Better Stack: Better Stack helps you prevent downtime by providing synthetic monitoring capabilities, including uptime monitoring and log management. The tool lets you monitor, log, and troubleshoot anything. You can visualize your entire stack, categorize your logs neatly, and gain the clarity you need to debug issues and fix incidents quickly.

There are observability dashboards, which help you make sense of monitoring data from summarized metrics that are presented in beautifully designed dashboards. The tool monitors everything and provides actionable alerts that help you resolve issues faster. In addition, Better Stack allows your team members to collaborate effectively.

Better Stack Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include incident management and status pages. Incident management capabilities provide you with all the debug data you need to resolve issues and collaborate with your team members. Status pages are designed to help you to keep your customers in the loop, enabling you to build trust and keep them informed. The pages are very customizable so you can use custom CSS to change the design to suit your product.

Integrations include MongoDB, Ubuntu, Apache2, Redis, Docker, Vector, Google Cloud, Heroku, Microsoft Azure, Datadog, and New Relic.

Trusted by thousands of companies, including global brands like Pepsi, SkyWest, and Nokia, this platform helps you perform website uptime, website speed, real user, and transaction monitoring.

Why I picked Uptimia: I added this solution to my list because it makes monitoring the speed of user experience for your visitors very easy and reliable. It lets you simulate user behaviors and get detailed reports on loading speeds. You can track how your website is performing by country, browser, and operating system.

Uptimia Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include website transaction monitoring. With Uptimia, you can reliably monitor shopping carts, login forms, check-out forms, and more. You get notified when something goes wrong with your transactions. The tool takes a step farther to let you know the root cause of the problem.

Integrations include Discord, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Telegram, Webhooks, and WhatsApp.

StatusCake offers monitoring features that enable you to keep tabs on different areas of your product with uptime, page speed, domains, server, and SSL monitoring. It provides collaboration features and helps you with everything you need to run your website efficiently.

Why I picked StatusCake: It provides a standard Page Speed Monitoring functionality that allows you to track how quickly your pages load. With StatusCake, you get a detailed report, which helps you observe and analyze page speed trends so you can see webpages, content, and code that need optimization.

Another reason I added StatusCake to my list is because of its friendly customer support. The customer service team provides unlimited support. There is an average response duration of 21 minutes. And you can get help even if you’re on a free account.

StatusCake Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: This tool is designed to provide micro downtime alerts. You get notified even if your website is down for 10 seconds. It also offers global monitoring, which enables you to monitor your product’s uptime and downtime across countries. If your website is down in the UK but up in the US, you’re going to be alerted about it.

It offers server monitoring, which enables you to predict downtime before it happens. With StatusCake’s SSL monitoring, you can ensure the continuous security of your product by being alerted before your SSL certificate expires.

Integrations: StatusCake features 14+ integrations, including Datadog, OpsGenie, Pushover, Webhook, Discord, PagerDuty, Slack, Mattermost, Telegram, and Microsoft Teams.

Upptime is an open-source uptime monitor and status page that is powered by GitHub. It helps you keep track of multiple web pages and provides actionable reports you need to run interventions accordingly.

Why I picked Upptime: It allows you to monitor uptime at short intervals — every 5 minutes. Powered by GitHub, you can keep track of unlimited web pages using GitHub Actions. Upptime notifies you as soon as any web page goes down and also saves version-controlled response time stats. With in-built alerting support for Slack, Telegram, and other communication tools, you enjoy the flexibility of selecting how you want to receive notifications.

Upptime Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: Upptime offers a modern status page, which is a statically generated status website that displays your website’s live status, incident history, and response time graphs to users. The status page is customizable; you can add a logo and other branding elements to make it reflect your brand image.

Integrations include Slack, Telegram, Webhooks, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, Google Sheets, Discord, Trello, and Asana.

Uptrends offer synthetic monitoring solutions, including website monitoring, web application monitoring, and API monitoring. The software lets you test your website from up to 233 global locations.

Why I picked Uptrends: This tool helps you improve your web performance with its real browser web performance monitoring. It allows you to run website performance tests from 233 locations across the globe. Uptrends opens up a real browser from a location you have chosen and simulates user journeys on your websites exactly like a real user would use your website.

It provides detailed performance data, showing the root cause of issues and which element on your page caused the problem. Uptrends lets you see how your website performs on mobile devices. You can simulate user behavior on mobile devices using popular browsers.

Uptrends Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include a Transaction Recorder, custom metrics, and concurrent monitoring. With Uptrends’ Transaction Recorder, you can record and keep an eye on shopping carts, payment providers, and opt-in forms. The custom metrics features allow you to track API metrics according to your needs. You can get custom data from API responses and get a good understanding of your total API performance.

Concurrent monitoring enables faster business transaction monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, troubleshooting, and problem resolution. This capability empowers you to perform a single check and get results from multiple locations.

Integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, StatusHub, VictorOps, ServiceNow, StatusPage, AlertOps, Grafana, and Opsgenie.

Prometheus is a monitoring system and time series database. This open-source monitoring platform helps you gain visibility into your product's code quality or performance by providing reliable monitoring solutions.

Why I picked Prometheus: With this tool, you get access to multiple modes for visualizing data, including a Grafana integration, a built-in expression browser, and a console template language. Prometheus features many client libraries, which make the instrumentation of services easy. It supports more than ten languages and easy-to-use custom libraries. In addition, there are many integrations so you can extend its capabilities with your favorite tools.

Prometheus Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include precise alerting and efficient storage. Prometheus alerts are defined based on its flexible PromQL and they maintain dimensional information. With this tool, your monitoring data is stored in memory and on a local disk in an efficient, reliable custom format.

Integrations include Docker, HAProxy, StatsD, JMX metrics, Asana, AWS SNS, Better Uptime, Canopsis, DingTalk, and Discord.

UptimeRobot is a leading all-in-one, uptime monitoring solution. The software enables you to keep an eye on your assets or products everywhere you go. When something goes wrong, you get notified!

Why I picked UptimeRobot: I selected UptimeRobot because of its diverse synthetic monitoring capabilities. With this software, you can monitor all your digital assets in one place. It offers a range of monitoring solutions, including website, SSL, ping, port, cron job, and keyword monitoring. 

UptimeRobot allows you to run multi-location checks. You can control or prevent false positives by verifying incidents from multiple locations. The tool lets you keep your team members and stakeholders in the know by inviting them to access your monitors and get notified about incidents.

UptimeRobot Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: UptimeRobot enables you to share incident updates with your customers. You can send status updates through an email to customers that are subscribed to your Status page. The software provides white-labeled status pages, which you can customize to reflect your brand image. 

Integrations: UptimeRobot has 10+ integrations, including Slack, Telegram, Webhooks, Discord, PagerDuty, Pushbullet, Microsoft Teams, Pushover, Google Chat, and Splunk On-Call.