Which pillar of observability is most associated with synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring is closely associated with traces within the context of observability. This type of monitoring involves simulating user interactions with an application in order to test and analyze its performance and availability from various locations. Traces track the end-to-end journey of a request as it moves through different services and components of an application, enabling teams to pinpoint where delays or errors occur during user interactions.

By utilizing synthetic monitoring to generate traces, organizations can gain insights into the latency and performance of their applications from the user's perspective, allowing them to identify and resolve issues proactively. This helps teams understand not just what is happening in their systems, but why it is happening, bridging the gap between user experience and system performance.

Metrics, logs, and events, while they play crucial roles in observability, do not specifically encompass the context of simulated user interactions that synthetic monitoring provides. Metrics offer quantitative data about system performance, logs provide detailed records of events and transactions, and events signify noteworthy occurrences within a system. In contrast, traces provide a holistic view of the path taken by requests, which is fundamentally what synthetic monitoring aims to analyze.