Isn’t real user monitoring (RUM) enough?

RUM tells you what happened to real users. It’s reactive and confounded by user behavior and ad blockers. Synthetics are proactive, deterministic, and can run during rollouts to catch issues before they hit real users. You need both: synthetics for gates and leading indicators; RUM for long‑tail analysis and cohort impact.

Aren’t synthetics flaky and expensive?

They are if you treat them like Selenium from 2010. Use Playwright/k6 with deterministic data, inject trace context, and run at low concurrency continuously with bursts during rollouts. Keep flows short, idempotent, and owned. Use open‑source runners for frequency and a SaaS for multi‑region coverage. Review and prune monthly.

How do we avoid paging on noise?

Page on SLO burn and user‑visible pain. For synthetics, require consecutive failures, use multi‑region quorum, and correlate with dependency error rates. Enrich alerts with runbook links and example traces so the on‑call can act in minutes, not after a Slack archeology dig.

Reliability-observability · Oct 25, 2025 · 10 minute read

Status Page Green, Revenue Red: Synthetic Monitors That Predict Incidents and Gate Rollouts

Stop waiting for Twitter to tell you you’re down. Build synthetics that behave like pissed‑off users, surface leading indicators, and automatically pause bad rollouts.

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Status Page Green, Revenue Red: Synthetic Monitors That Predict Incidents and Gate Rollouts

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist