Digital experience monitoring

Digital experience monitoring tracks the performance and availability of external websites and URI endpoints using synthetic monitoring methods, or monitoring real user activity and experiences with a website.

To monitor a website or URI endpoint with synthetic methods, SolarWinds Observability SaaS uses probes to periodically connect to the website and perform tests. The tests verify the website's availability and report it's availability (uptime), whether the SSL/TLS certificate will expire, and response times from the availability tests. Ping tests send echo requests to your URI and wait for responses using the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). TCP/IP tests send a string request to your URI and verify the returned response using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). See Synthetic monitoring for details about the synthetic availability tests.

The probes that test the websites are located on servers in various places around the world. See Probe servers and associated IP addresses.

To perform real user monitoring (RUM), a script is placed into the HTML of your website. When a visitor accesses your website, the JavaScript sends data collected from the browser to SolarWinds Observability SaaS. This data may include details about the user, such as where they are located or what browser they use, and details about their experiences interacting with the website, such as page load times. See Real user monitoring for more details about collecting RUM data.

Use this data to observe variations in the availability and use of your website at different locations over time. You can configure alerts to notify you of problems with a website's availability or user experience.

Monitor your critical website functions through Synthetic transactions. Synthetic transactions in SolarWinds Observability SaaS test specific aspects of your monitored websites, giving you insight into whether your websites are functioning as expected. See Synthetic transactions for more information.

Monitor an external website, URI, or Synthetic transaction in SolarWinds Observability SaaS

To monitor an external website, see Add a website. To monitor a URI, see Add a URI. To add a Synthetic transaction, see Add a Synthetic transaction.

Use the digital experience area overview to view metric data gathered from all monitored websites, URIs, and Synthetic transactions.

Use the Entity Explorer to view a list of your observed website, URI, and Synthetic transaction entities. The synthetic availability results are available in the entity details tabs. These widgets include test results details and availability metrics, such as the percentage of tests that succeed, the average response time, and response time history. The real user monitoring metrics for websites are shown in the RUM widgets of the entity details tabs. These results include the number of pageviews, the top pages visited, a map of visitors to your website, and the actual load time of the webpages.

Website, URI, and Synthetic transaction metrics are also available in the Metrics Explorer.

The probe servers for SolarWinds Observability SaaS need to be able to access your configured websites and URI entities. If the targeted website or URI endpoint blocks the probe's access with a firewall or an access control list, the test result might incorrectly indicate a failure. To observe websites or URIs hosted on a local network, your server or site must allow access to SolarWinds Observability SaaS probe server IP addresses. See Probe servers and associated IP addresses.

Website, URI, and Synthetic transaction widgets

In addition to standard visualizations of metric data, widgets display detailed insights into your websites, URIs, or Synthetic transactions and their test results. See Digital Experience overview for information about Digital Experience Widgets.