Is your website suffering from frequent outages and unexpected downtime? If yes, then you should look into Synthetic monitoring.
Synthetic monitoring is a proactive way to monitor the performance and availability of your web applications and services by simulating user requests and actions from different locations. Synthetic monitoring helps you to:
- Detect issues before they affect your real users
- Ensure consistent user experience across devices and browsers
- Measure service level agreements (SLAs) and objectives (SLOs)
- Optimize your web performance and reliability.
RunCloud allows you to manage your cloud servers with ease, and you can also integrate RunCloud with Datadog to monitor your server metrics, logs, and events.
Datadog is a cloud-based platform that provides synthetic monitoring solutions for API, browser, and mobile tests. You can create and manage different types of synthetic tests with Datadog, such as API tests, multistep API tests, browser tests, or private locations.
In this post, you will learn how to use Datadog and RunCloud together to monitor your web applications and servers with synthetic monitoring. You will also see how to create and manage synthetic tests with Datadog, analyze and troubleshoot synthetic test results with Datadog, and set up alerts, dashboards, and reports for your synthetic tests with Datadog.
Let’s get started!
Setting up Datadog and RunCloud
Before you can use Datadog and RunCloud for synthetic monitoring, you’ll need to create an account on both platforms, and install the Datadog agent on your RunCloud server. Here are the steps to do that:
- Creating an account on Datadog: Go to the Datadog website and click on the “Get Started” button.
- Logging in to your server via SSH: You need to connect to your server with superuser privileges to install the monitoring agent. Read our guide on configuring SSH to learn more.
- Install the Datadog agent on your RunCloud server: The Datadog agent is a tool that collects and sends metrics, logs, and events from your server to Datadog. To install the Datadog agent, follow these steps:
- Go to the Datadog dashboard and click on the “Integrations” button.
- Select “Datadog Agent” from the list and click on the “Ubuntu” tab to view the installation command.
- Copy the Installation Script and paste it in your terminal. This will start the installation process – wait for the installation to complete.
You have successfully set up Datadog and RunCloud for synthetic monitoring. After installation, the agent will start sending data within a few minutes. Once you get the message “Your first Datadog Agent is reporting. Congrats!”, you can click on the “Finish →” button to complete the installation.
In the next section, you will learn how to create and manage synthetic tests with Datadog.
Creating and managing synthetic tests with Datadog
Synthetic tests are simulated user requests and actions that you can create and run with Datadog to monitor the performance and availability of your web applications and services. Datadog supports three types of synthetic tests: API tests, multistep API tests, and browser tests.
- API tests: API tests are HTTP requests that you can send to your API endpoints and verify the response status code, body, headers, or latency. You can use API tests to check the functionality, performance, and reliability of your API endpoints. You can also chain multiple API tests together to create multi step API tests.
- Multistep API tests: Multistep API tests are sequences of API tests that you can use to simulate complex user journeys or workflows involving multiple API calls. You can use multistep API tests to check the end-to-end functionality, performance, and reliability of your web applications and services. You can also extract variables from one API test and use them in another API test within the same multi step test.
- Browser tests: Browser tests are user interactions that you can record and replay with a headless browser to monitor the performance and availability of your web pages. You can use browser tests to check the functionality, performance, and reliability of your web pages. You can also add assertions, variables, screenshots, or video recordings to your browser tests.
In addition to this, you can also run tests from private locations. Private locations are dedicated machines that you can use to run synthetic tests from your own network or infrastructure. You can use private locations to monitor internal or private web applications and services that are not accessible from the public internet.
To create tests with Datadog, follow these steps:
- On your Datadog dashboard, click on “UX Monitoring” tab and go to the “Synthetics” page.
- Click on the “New Test” button and choose the type of synthetic test you want to create: API test, multistep API test, or browser test.
- Follow the instructions on the screen to configure your synthetic test settings, such as the test name, URL, frequency, locations, assertions, variables, screenshots, video recordings, etc.
- Click on the “Save Test” button to save your synthetic test. After you have created a synthetic test with Datadog, it will be executed automatically according to the specified interval.
Analyzing and Troubleshooting Synthetic Monitoring Results
You can use synthetic test results to identify and resolve issues that affect your web performance and reliability. To access and interpret synthetic test results with Datadog, follow these steps:
- Click on the synthetic test that you want to analyze. You will see the Test Details page, which shows the latest test result, and the historical test results for that synthetic test.
- On the Test Details page, you can see various information about your synthetic test result, such as the test status, duration, response time, latency, errors, screenshots, video recordings, APM traces, etc. You can use this information to evaluate the performance and availability of your web applications and services. You can also compare different test results over time or across locations to identify trends or anomalies.
- If your synthetic test result shows an error or a failure, you can use the Error Panel to see the details of the error or failure, such as the error message, stack trace, screenshot, video recording, APM trace, etc. You can use this information to troubleshoot and fix the issue that caused the error or failure. You can also click on the “Share” button to share the error details with your team or stakeholders via email or Slack.
Summary
Synthetic monitoring is a proactive way to monitor the performance and availability of your web applications and services by simulating user requests and actions from different locations. In this post, you have learned how to use Datadog and RunCloud for synthetic monitoring.
By using Datadog and RunCloud together, you can monitor your web applications and servers with synthetic monitoring in a simple and efficient way. You can also benefit from the features and capabilities of both platforms to improve your web performance and reliability.
If you want to start using RunCloud for your web hosting needs, you can sign up for a free trial. RunCloud makes server management easy by providing you with a user-friendly interface, a powerful script installer, a robust security system, and a flexible backup system.
