A first look at Google’s new synthetic monitoring offering
With Google recently launching Synthetic Monitoring as part of their Cloud Monitoring toolkit it provides an opportunity to introduce the topic of “application monitoring”.
Google has recently announced the addition of synthetic monitoring to their Cloud Monitoring toolkit and it’s a positive first step for anyone working primarily within the GCP ecosystem and its native services.
Under the covers the checks run as Cloud Functions, and there is an open-source Google Synthetics SDK — examples show how to implement a simple url check, although that is of limited use beyond a learning and extension point (and it does not differentiate from their existing capabilities).
Libraries such as Puppeteer can be used to extend into browser interactions for scripting end-to-end user journeys. Alerting policies can be configured and the dashboard includes metrics for latency and success %.
As an initial public preview it’s basic in its feature set, but I’m sure that it’ll evolve quickly. I’ll follow up with a more detailed hands-on article shortly.
For anyone unfamiliar with the topic, synthetic monitoring provides an outside-in lens for…
