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Two monitoring approaches answer two different questions. Synthetic monitoring answers "would the checkout flow work right now if someone tried it?" Real user monitoring answers "what did the checkout flow actually do for the 4,000 people who tried it today?" The first is a robot testing a path on a schedule; the second is instrumentation recording reality as it happens. Teams reach for one when they need the other, then conclude monitoring "doesn't work." The fix is understanding what each is structurally good at — and where each is blind. Synthetic monitoring: proactive, scripted, continuous Synthetic monitoring runs scripted checks against your application from the outside, on a fixed schedule. An HTTP check hits an endpoint and asserts on the response; a browser check drives a headless Chromium through a journey — log in, add to cart, pay — and asserts on what the user would see. The defining property is that it does not need real traffic. The check runs every 30 seconds whether or not anyone is using the app, from datacenters you choose, testing exactly the journeys you scripted. When a deploy breaks checkout at 3 AM, a synthetic check catches it at 3 AM — not at 9 AM when the first customer wakes up. Real user monitoring: passive, real, traffic-dependent RUM instruments your actual frontend with a JavaScript snippet that reports back what real visitors experience: page load times, Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), JavaScript errors, the device and network and geography of every session. It is a recording of reality with perfect fidelity — these are real people, real conditions, real outcomes. The cost of that fidelity is that RUM is entirely traffic-dependent and entirely retrospective. It can only report on paths real users took, after they took them. A page nobody visited generates no RUM data. A broken deploy at 3 AM is invisible to RUM until a real user hits it and the error is recorded. The core difference, side by side Dimension Synthetic monitoring Real

Most synthetic monitoring setups fail in one of a few predictable ways. They monitor everything and alert on nothing useful. They assert on status code 200 and miss the empty response body. They run flaky browser checks that page someone at 2 AM for a problem that fixed itself by 2:01. Or they go stale — the checkout flow changed three months ago and the check has been failing-then-being-ignored ever since. These are not exotic failures. They are the default outcome of setting up synthetic monitoring without a discipline. Here is the discipline. 1. Monitor the journeys that cost money, not everything Every browser check costs compute and, more importantly, costs maintenance. A check on a path that does not matter is worse than no check — it generates noise that trains your team to ignore alerts. Rank your journeys by cost of silent failure and monitor the top of the list: Authentication — login, signup. The gate to everything else. The revenue path — checkout, upgrade, add payment method. The core product action — the one thing your product exists to do. Critical third-party handoffs — OAuth redirects, payment iframes, SSO. Leave static pages, read-only endpoints, and admin screens to cheaper uptime and API checks . A good rule: if a path breaking would not generate a support ticket or lose revenue, it does not need a browser check. 2. Assert on what the user sees, not just the status code The entire point of synthetic monitoring is catching the failure that a 200 OK hides. So your assertions have to go past the status code. // Weak: passes even when the page renders an error await page . goto ( " https://shop.example.com/checkout " ); expect ( page . url ()). toContain ( " /checkout " ); // Strong: asserts the user can actually complete the action await page . getByRole ( " button " , { name : " Pay now " }). click (); await expect ( page . getByText ( " Order confirmed " )). toBeVisible ({ timeout : 10000 , }); await expect ( page . getByTestId ( " order-number "

You already have Playwright tests. They run in CI on every pull request, they assert that login works and checkout completes, and then they stop — because CI only runs them against a branch, at merge time. The moment the code is in production, those tests go silent. A third-party script breaks checkout at 3 AM and your perfectly good test suite says nothing, because nothing triggered it. Playwright monitoring closes that gap: you take the same browser tests and run them on a schedule against production, turning your end-to-end suite into a synthetic monitoring system that watches real user journeys continuously. Prerequisites Node.js 18+ and an existing project ( npm install -D @playwright/test , then npx playwright install chromium ). A deployed production (or staging) URL to run checks against. A dedicated synthetic test account — never a real customer's credentials. A secret store for that account's credentials (GitHub Actions secrets, or your platform's equivalent). Never hard-code them. Step 1 — Write a check that asserts on what the user sees A monitor-grade check is not "did the page load." It is "could a user complete the thing they came to do." Assert on the outcome, with a generous timeout for real-world latency: import { test , expect } from " @playwright/test " ; test ( " checkout reaches confirmation " , async ({ page }) => { await page . goto ( " https://shop.example.com " ); await page . getByRole ( " button " , { name : " Add to cart " }). click (); await page . getByRole ( " link " , { name : " Checkout " }). click (); await page . getByLabel ( " Email " ). fill ( process . env . SYNTHETIC_EMAIL ! ); await page . getByLabel ( " Card number " ). fill ( " 4242424242424242 " ); await page . getByRole ( " button " , { name : " Pay now " }). click (); // The assertion a 200 OK can never make for you: await expect ( page . getByText ( " Order confirmed " )). toBeVisible ({ timeout : 15000 , }); }); Credentials come from process.env , not the source. The t

Synthetic monitoring tools all promise the same thing — catch the broken checkout before your users do — and then bill you in seven different ways for it. The hard part of choosing one is not the feature checklist; it is predicting what you will actually pay when a single browser check running every 30 seconds from three regions turns into 259,200 runs a month. We compared seven synthetic monitoring tools on what separates them in practice: browser engine and fidelity, how you author checks (code, recorder, or AI), location coverage, alerting and on-call, failure forensics, and — the one that surprises teams — the pricing model. Every price below was verified against official pricing pages in June 2026. For the concepts behind these tools, start with what synthetic monitoring is . TL;DR comparison Tool Best for Browser engine Authoring Pricing model Browser price Checkly Code-first teams running Playwright suites Chromium (+ suite) Code (TypeScript) Per-run, 3 separate bills ~$4–6.50 / 1k Datadog Enterprises that want APM correlation Chrome/FF/Edge Recorder + code Per-run × freq × locations ~$12–18 / 1k Grafana Cloud / k6 OSS-leaning teams, best free tier Chromium (k6) Code (k6) + convert Per-execution ~$50 / 10k Better Stack Bundled monitoring + on-call Chromium Code + codegen paste Per-minute + per-seat ~$1 / 100 PW-min New Relic Broad type matrix + compliance Selenium (Chrome/FF) No-code step + code Per-check + seats + ingest ~$50 / 10k Sematext Predictable per-monitor pricing Chromium Code Per-monitor / month ~$7 / browser monitor Site24x7 No-code recorder + many locations Chrome/FF Recorder Pooled "advanced checks" ~$10 / 10k runs How we evaluated Real synthetic monitoring is more than a scheduled ping, so we scored each tool on six dimensions. Browser fidelity : does it run a modern engine (Playwright/Chromium) or older Selenium, and how faithfully does it reproduce a real user? Authoring mode : can you write checks as code, record them point-and-click, or gen