As part of your monitoring and testing strategy, you may run tests on different types of applications that are not publicly available—from local versions of production-level websites to internal applications that directly support your employees. Testing each one requires leveraging tools that allow you to verify functionality across a wide range of devices, browsers, and workflows while maintaining a secure environment.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is an increasingly popular method for securing user accounts that requires users to provide two or more pieces of identifying information when logging into an application. This information can consist of unique verification links or codes sent to the user’s phone or email address, as well as time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs) generated by authenticator applications or hardware.

While unit testing and integration testing can give you insight into the individual functionalities of an application, “at times you need some sort of monitoring or testing mechanism which also simulates a user’s behavior to test how the application would work or look to an actual user in the world,” says Grofers Software Development Engineer Yashvardhan Kukreja. That’s where synthetic monitoring comes in.

At Catchpoint, our mission is to provide customers with actionable data that will help them reduce MTTR and maintain a positive digital experience. We measure "from where the users are" to ensure the data reflects real end-user experience. As someone that's part of the Catchpoint on-call chain, this is extremely important to me. I do not want to be woken up at 2 AM because a server is misbehaving, only to find out that the application failed over gracefully and no users were impacted.