Uptime.com Offers Synthetic Transaction Monitoring to Track Performance, User Experience, Preventing Revenue Loss

When customers are unable to access a company's e-commerce website to complete purchases, it not only affects sales but also the brand's reputation. Understanding the scope of an outage, such as the number of affected customers and the regions impacted, is essential. "Without synthetic transaction monitoring, answering these questions takes time, leading to revenue loss. Every second matters," said Jonathan Franconi, Uptime.com's Chief Product Officer. He emphasized the importance of a downtime monitoring platform to safeguard brand recognition and minimize revenue losses.

While most companies rely on basic website monitoring to track site uptime, customers worldwide access websites and services through various internet providers, endpoints, networks, and devices. Franconi explained that although up/down checks are crucial for detecting major site outages and ensuring global accessibility, they fail to provide a comprehensive view of service availability. Synthetic transaction monitoring bridges this gap by offering unparalleled visibility.

Uptime.com's solution utilizes repeatable transactions to identify anomalies and failures that could lead to process breakdowns or revenue losses. "Synthetic transaction monitoring is an exceptional tool that leverages repeatable transactions or specific user flows on business-critical areas, such as e-commerce checkout processes or site login functionalities," Franconi said. These transaction checks can be scripted manually or recorded using a built-in browser script recorder.

By running scripts frequently, ideally every five minutes, the system can detect anomalies, failed steps, missing validations or backend responses that may result in process failures like checkout errors. These checks can be executed from multiple points of presence (POPs) or locations worldwide using the same script. Franconi added, "This comprehensive approach offers complete visibility to SREs, operation engineers, and developers, ensuring customers can successfully access your site and execute key business transactions from anywhere in the world."

Proactively addressing issues before they escalate and customers report them is crucial. The operations team can engage with customers via the company's status page and provide outage notifications. Combining synthetic transaction monitoring with basic monitoring offers the best protection. Synthetic transaction checks ensure an entire site is loaded and accessed like a real user would, providing unparalleled visibility into site availability, performance, and accessibility.