Most of us who work in IT understand the concept of basic monitoring. It is not that it is an irrelevant concept, but rather, it is essential for any infrastructure, either manual, by reading logs and checking machines and services; semi-automated, using custom-made scripts or, the safest and most recommended, using a specific tool such as Pandora FMS to centralize your monitoring. But what is synthetic monitoring? We will see that throughout this article.

In May 2020, Google introduced Core Web Vitals, a set of three metrics that serve as the gold standard for monitoring a site’s UX performance. These metrics, which focus on load performance, interactivity, and visual stability, simplify UX metric collection by signaling which frontend performance indicators matter the most.

With the pandemic and the new challenges it posed, it's safe to say we all felt like 2020 was a tumultuous year. In spite of the losses and hurdles we've faced, the resilience of humankind is helping us adapt and keep moving forward. At Zoho, we've adapted, too, and have switched to working remotely to ensure smooth transaction of our services. With the help of our customers' feedback, we were able to roll out almost all the features we had planned for the year.

Many of us get sentimental about past projects we’ve worked on…for me it is a mobile dashboard that leveraged ML/AI to help a sales team make quicker decisions while in the field (nerdy, I know…but it was one of my first projects as a UX Designer when I was starting out my career, and I have many fond memories about this project). For many members of the team at Grafana Labs, that sentimental project is worldPing.

We recently launched synthetic monitoring, which helps you understand your users’ experience and improve website performance by proactively monitoring your services. This feature, which surfaces the powerful capabilities of Prometheus blackbox exporter, is the next iteration of worldPing.