New Year, New Me: How Synthetic Monitoring Can Help You Start 2023 Fresh
As the new year has started, it’s natural to want to hit the ground running and make the most of the year ahead. One way to do that is by implementing a reliable synthetic monitoring solution.
But what exactly is synthetic monitoring, and how can it benefit your business? Synthetic monitoring involves using simulated or “synthetic” traffic to test your website or application’s availability, performance, and functionality by using automated scripts or virtual users, which mimic the actions of real users accessing your site.
There are many tools available for synthetic monitoring, one of which is Monika.
What is Monika?
Monika is an open-source and free command-line application that allows you to monitor your website(s) for outages or slow services. The name Monika stands for “Monitoring Berkala” in Bahasa Indonesia.
With Monika, you can easily add as many websites as you want to monitor, and configure it to send notifications of any incidents through your preferred communication tools, such as SMTP mail, WhatsApp (it’s free!), Microsoft Teams, Slack, and more.
Monika can be installed using Node Package Manager (NPM) by running npm install -g @hyperjumptech/monika, by downloading binaries from the Monika release page, or through package managers like Homebrew or Snapcraft.
Configuring Monika
Monika will monitor your site using a configuration file. Below is an example configuration file of Monika:
This configuration is setting up synthetic monitoring for the website https://www.google.com using Monika. The monitoring will use a single probe, identified by the unique ID and given the name “Google”.
The probe will send a GET request to the specified URL and trigger an alert if the response status is not between 200 and 299, or if the response time is more than 2000 milliseconds.
The configuration also specifies that an incident/recovery notification will be triggered if the same alert is triggered at least 3 times within a certain period.
Save the configuration above as monika.yml on your computer. Once you have the configuration ready, you can run Monika with the configuration above by running monika -c <path_to_monika.yml> in your terminal.
We previously made many articles about configuring Monika with other notification channels, which you can read below:
Conclusion
In conclusion, Monika is a powerful tool for ensuring the availability and performance of your website or application.
By continuously testing your site using Monika, you can catch any potential issues before they impact your real users and keep your site running smoothly.
With its easy setup and advanced features, Monika is a valuable asset for any business looking to start the new year off on the right foot. So, implementing Monika synthetic monitoring can be a great way to ensure the success of your online presence in 2023 and beyond.
Cut to the chase using NEO Sense
NEO Sense is the web application version of Monika. It simplifies the use of Monika through an easy-to-use dashboard interface. It provides a graphical user interface for you to create probes, set alerts and notifications, and check the validity of your TLS certificates.
Using NEO Sense you can probe your websites and endpoints from multiple locations. Below is the list of available locations currently:
- Jakarta, Indonesia
- Banten, Indonesia
- West Java, Indonesia
- Singapore, Singapore
- Tokyo, Japan
- New Jersey, United States
If you have used Monika before, you can easily import your existing Monika configuration to NEO Sense. Additionally, you can also import a HAR file, a sitemap file, or even Insomnia and Postman collection files.
Plus, you can configure NEO Sense to send notifications of incidents through your preferred communication tools, such as Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, DingTalk, and many more.
Hyperjump is an open-source-first company providing engineering excellence service. We aim to build and commercialize open-source tools to help companies streamline, simplify, and secure the most important aspects of their modern DevOps practices.
