Performance monitoring is critical for a healthy software application. If you don’t have synthetic testing or real user monitoring in place, opportunities for performance optimizations are slipping through the cracks. With the guidance of a monitoring tool, on the other hand, you could be fixing problems such as slow-loading pages within the hour. The two main types of application monitoring are Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetic testing (or synthetic monitoring).

Splunk customers are security conscious organizations demanding enterprise-grade features for their global workforce. Today, we are excited to announce several Splunk Synthetic Monitoring updates, including: support for Single Sign-On (SSO) via SAML 2.0, Concealed Global Variables, and an updated synthetic browser version (Chrome 97).

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) provides an enhanced security mechanism for your entire organization by requiring multiple methods of authentication credentials. Using traditionally managed passwords for accessing your apps, services, and networks is no longer a secure methodology. Indeed, cyber threats are on the rise. Hackers today employ sophisticated techniques such as spear-phishing or pharming to gain unauthorized access to corporate accounts.

One of the powerful tools available in Grafana Cloud is Synthetic Monitoring, a black box monitoring solution that can provide insights that are hard to get in other ways. It provides a different view of your application by observing performance and uptime externally and from all over the world. As a result, you can build an understanding of what your end users are actually experiencing. However, as great as it is, synthetic monitoring does have limitations.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) reduce latency by delivering cached data (e.g., JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos) from a network of linked proxy servers to end users around the globe. CDNs help reduce the load on your origin servers and shorten the distance that data needs to travel, thus improving the end-user experience.

Continuous integration (CI) has become the mainstream approach to software development as it enables organizations to iterate quickly while minimizing the risk of releasing faulty code. To implement CI, many organizations rely on Jenkins—one of the most mature and widely used automation servers on the market. Jenkins comes with hundreds of community-backed plugins to help you easily integrate it with other tools in your development workflow.