What is a common use case for synthetics?

A common use case for synthetics is to check if users can perform normal actions on your application. Synthetics simulate user interactions with your application to verify its functionality from the perspective of an end user. By executing predefined scripts that mimic user behavior, such as logging in, navigating pages, or interacting with various features, synthetics can identify issues that affect user experience, ensuring that the application behaves as expected under normal conditions. This proactive monitoring tool helps in catching errors before they impact real users, providing essential insights into application performance and reliability.

While the other options such as ensuring global access, measuring uptime, and conducting stress tests are important aspects of application monitoring, they are not the primary functions of synthetics. Ensuring global access involves testing latency and availability across different geographical locations, measuring uptime focuses on the application’s operational status over time, and stress testing looks at system resilience under heavy loads. Each of these plays a role in a comprehensive monitoring strategy, but checking user actions is specifically tailored to maintaining the user interface and experience by simulating real-use cases.