Synthetic Monitoring for APIs
São Paulo users could not log in while US-East internal probes were green—probes bypassed the CDN misconfiguration affecting Brazil. Synthetics run scripted journeys from multiple regions through the same path users take.
k6 example
OAuth token grant → API call with X-Synthetic: true header → business assertions on JSON body, not just status 200.
Alerting
Synthetic failures are symptom alerts—page when 2+ regions fail. Correlate with internal RED when synthetic fails but internal green (CDN/DNS/WAF).
Hygiene
Teardown test data; whitelist or dedicated tenant; retry with backoff; silence during planned maintenance with documented bypass.
Multi-step journey teardown
Synthetic create-order flows must delete test data in finally block—orphan orders pollute analytics and inventory. Use dedicated synthetic_tenant_id filtered from business dashboards.
Private API probing
APIs not on public internet: deploy synthetic probes inside VPC (Grafana Private Probe, self-hosted k6 in cluster) while also probing public edge for split-brain detection.
SLA reporting
Monthly uptime report for customers cites synthetic success rate from external probes—not internal kubelet health. Aligns contractual SLA with measurement method legal expects.
Certificate expiry synthetic
Dedicated probe validates TLS cert expiry >14 days on all public API hostnames—catches Let's Encrypt renewal failures before users see browser warnings. Separate from journey synthetics but same on-call routing.
Webhook inbound synthetic
Payment providers callback your webhook—synthetic cannot easily simulate unless provider offers test mode webhook replay. Document gap; use provider status page + manual quarterly webhook drill.
Coordinating with deployment windows
Silence synthetics during planned maintenance that intentionally returns 503 from edge—OR configure synthetics to hit maintenance bypass header on origin directly to validate origin health while edge shows maintenance page to users. Document which mode your status page commit uses to avoid false external green during deliberate user-facing maintenance.
Compare synthetic latency from multiple regions in one dashboard—single-region probe misses regional BGP issues affecting subset of users; multi-region disagreement triggers investigation before global page.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Document rollback paths and validate observability after every deploy affecting this surface.
Production review cadence
Revisit dashboards and alert thresholds after every deploy affecting this observability surface. Weekly on-call review should include one exemplar trace or log linked from a metric spike—paper metrics without exemplars train teams to ignore charts.
Frequently asked questions
How is synthetic different from health checks?
Health checks run inside cluster; synthetics exercise full public path including DNS, TLS, CDN, OAuth.
Which flows first?
Tier-1 login, search, checkout—one deep journey per critical domain.
How handle OAuth in checks?
Dedicated test user with refresh token in secrets manager; rotate automatically.
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