Set up Splunk Synthetic Monitoring 🔗
Monitor the performance of your web pages and applications by running synthetic Browser, Uptime, and API tests. These tests let you proactively alert the relevant teams when a site or user flow they manage becomes unavailable, as well as report on the performance of a site or user flow over time. Splunk Synthetic Monitoring does not require extensive installation and setup: you can get started by creating your first test directly in the Splunk Synthetic Monitoring user interface.
Get your site ready to run synthetic tests 🔗
There are a couple of settings you might need to add to your application or webpage to receive traffic from Splunk Synthetic Monitoring.
Allow Splunk Synthetic Monitoring IP addresses 🔗
Splunk Synthetic Monitoring runs synthetic tests from a set of dedicated IP addresses. To ensure your internal network or web application firewall (WAF) does not block this traffic, place these IP addresses on your browser or site’s allow list.
See Public locations for the list of Splunk Synthetic Monitoring IP addresses, and then refer to your internal network’s documentation for instructions on how to add them to your allow list.
Exclude Splunk Synthetic Monitoring from analytics 🔗
If you use a web analytics tool to monitor traffic on your website or application, you might want to exclude Splunk Synthetic Monitoring IP addresses from being counted as traffic.
To do so, filter Splunk Synthetic Monitoring IP addresses in the settings of your web analytics tool. See Public locations for the list of IP addresses, and then refers to your analytics tool’s documentation for instructions on how to filter them.
Choose a test 🔗
The following table outlines which test might work for the scenario you want to monitor.
Test |
Workflow you want to monitor |
|---|---|
Uptime |
|
Browser test |
|
API |
|
Set up your first test 🔗
After you choose which type of test you want to use, follow these steps to set up your test:
Test |
Resources |
|---|---|
Uptime |
|
Browser |
|
API |
(Optional) Link Synthetic spans to APM spans 🔗
If you link Synthetic spans to APM spans, you can follow the story of your data from front-end to back-end. Splunk Synthetics uses server timing to calculate the response time between the front end and back end of your application, and to join the front-end and back-end traces for end-to-end visibility.
If a span in Splunk Synthetics has an associated back-end span, an APM link appears next to the span in the waterfall view of run results page and opens the span details page in Splunk APM.
By default, the Splunk Distributions of OpenTelemetry already send the Server-Timing header. The header links spans from the browser with back-end spans and traces.
The APM environment variable for controlling the Server-Timing header is SPLUNK_TRACE_RESPONSE_HEADER_ENABLED=true. Set SPLUNK_TRACE_RESPONSE_HEADER_ENABLED=true to link to Splunk APM.
After you set the environment variable, your application instrumentation adds the following response headers to HTTP responses:
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Server-Timing
Server-Timing: traceparent;desc="00-<serverTraceId>-<serverSpanId>-01"
The Server-Timing header contains the traceId and spanId parameters in traceparent format. To learn more, see:
Server timing from the W3C documentation.
Traceparent header from the W3C documentation.
For more examples on Java instrumentation, see Server trace information.
(Optional) Integrate with Splunk RUM 🔗
Integrate with Splunk RUM so that you can automatically measure Web Vital metrics against your run results. Web vitals capture key metrics that affect user experience and assess the overall performance of your site. For more, see Compare run results to Web Vitals with Splunk RUM.
Continue learning 🔗
See Key concepts in Splunk Synthetic Monitoring to learn more about important terms and concepts in Splunk Synthetic Monitoring.