Day 38 of 60
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Production & continuous
Synthetic monitoring
The cheapest production safety net: scripted user journeys running every minute from every region. The certificate you forgot to renew, the DNS change that didn't propagate, synthetics find them before customers tweet.
ProblemOutages and regressions found by your customers, not your dashboards.
How it works
Continuously run scripted user journeys against production from multiple regions. Alert on deviation. Catches what pre-deploy E2E can't.
What it catches
Deploy-time regressions, certificate expiry, third-party outages, regional issues, DNS issues. Single most cost-effective production monitor.
Tools
Checkly · SaaS Datadog Synthetics · SaaS Grafana Synthetic Monitoring · Hybrid
Verdict by project size
Small
Rec
Medium
Must
Large
Must
Extra-large
Must
Cost
| Project size | Setup | Maint / mo | Tool / mo | CI / run |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small <10k LOC | 4h | 1h | $50 | , |
| Medium 10–100k LOC | 1d | 4h | $200 | , |
| Large 100k–1M LOC | 5d | 15h | $1k | , |
| Extra-large >1M LOC | 15d | 50h | $5k | , |
Setup = engineer-days to first useful run ·
Maint = engineer-hours / month at steady state ·
Tool = out-of-pocket $ / month ·
CI = minutes added (or saved) per pipeline run
Lifecycle & ownership
When in lifecycle
Release Operate Observe
Continuous in prod · Always-on, observing real traffic.
Who owns it
SRE / DevOps / Platform
CI/CD, observability, reliability
Collaborates with: Developer
Reference implementations
-
Checkly examples
Synthetic monitoring checks as code for production user journeys.
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Grafana Synthetic Monitoring
Production synthetic checks and multi-region monitoring workflow.
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Blackbox Exporter examples
Prometheus probe-based synthetic monitoring for HTTP, DNS, TCP, and ICMP.
Quick check
Synthetic monitoring catches what pre-deploy E2E cannot?
One question. Pick the best answer. Your streak is saved locally on this device.
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