Navigating Synthetic Monitoring

This article covers how to effectively navigate the Synthetic Monitoring app, and configure it so that you can see the information you need.

Home Page

The Synthetic Monitoring Home page shows all of your Scouts, with a summary of each Scout's configuration and test results.

There are two ways to display this page:

• Grid view, where each Scout has its own widget. This view lets you see more graphical test result information for each Scout.
• List view. This view is more compact, and also lets you select Scouts using the checkboxes to perform an action on multiple Scouts at the same time.

Switch between these views at the top-right of the page.

Select a Scout Type to Show

At the top of the Home page, you can select which of the three main types of Scouts you want to display - EUC, Infrastructure, or Applications. When you select a Scout type, the Test Overview graph shows test result summary with all Scouts of the selected type.

You can select All Types to show all of your Scouts.

Select a Time Period for Test Results

By default, the Home page shows test results for the last 24 hours. You can change the time period at the top of the page. Select from preset time periods, or enter a custom range.

Filter your Scouts

To filter the Scouts that are displayed on the Home page:

1. Select Filter Scouts to see the available filter categories. In addition to the default filter categories, custom labels also appear in the list if you have added any to your Scouts. For more information on labels, see Scout Labels below.
   

2. Select a filter category to see the available values for that category.

3. Select a filter value to add the filter.

The filter is now applied to all the Scouts on the Home page, indicated by the blue box. You can add additional filters, or remove them.

Scout Details Page

From the Synthetic Monitoring Home page, click a Scout's name to open the Scout Details page.

On this page, you can see details of the Scouts configuration, and more statistics about the test results. The statistics on this page are relevant to the selected Hives and time period at the top of the page.

Perform Actions on the Scout

From the Scout Details page, you can perform the following actions on the Scout:

• Create an Alert Policy so that you are notified when issues occur. For details, visit Alert Policies.
  The alert policy icon indicates the status of the alert policy:
  • indicates that an alert policy already exists.
  • indicates that an alert policy exists, but it is disabled.
  • indicates that no alert policy exists.
• Delete the Scout permanently.
• Edit the Scout's configuration.
• Disable the Scout temporarily. If you disable a Scout, the Scout's configuration and previous test results are saved, but the Scout does not run any new tests and collect new information. You can enable the Scout again at any time.

See test result statistics

On the Scout Details page, you can see detailed and interactive test result statistics including:

• The number of successful and unsuccessful tests.
• The test failure rate.
• Other metrics, depending on the type of Scout you are viewing.

For example, the image below shows result statistics for an HTTP/S Scout.

These results are interactive. You can hover over the graphs to see a tooltip with more information, or click on a data point in the graph to jump straight to the relevant test results.

See test results per Hive

The Hives List widget shows metrics for each Hive running the Scout, along with the results for each hive. You can switch between a List view and Map view at the top-right of the widget.
The data shown in this widget is relevant to the time period you have selected in the top-right of the page.

The List view contains the following metrics for each Hive:

• Uptime. The percentage of test results that were successful.
• Availability. The success rate of tests over the time period selected at the top-right of the time.
• Health. The health rate of the hive.
• Avg. Response Time How long it took the hive to respond.

The Map view enables you to see each Hive geographically. This lets you visually identify regions that are experiencing problems.

See Individual Test Results for Scouts

From the Details page of a Scout, click View all results to see a list of the scout's test results.

In the list of test results, you can sort and filter the columns, select which columns to display, and export the list to a CSV file.

Click a test result to open the Test Details page for the test. The type of information returned in a test result depends on the Scout Type. See documentation for EUC, Infrastructure, and Application Scouts to see what kind of information Synthetic Monitoring can get.

Scout Labels

Scout labels are custom key-value pairs that help you organize and filter your Scouts into groups.

For example, you could add the label key Environment with values like production, QA, etc. This allows you to filter and monitor Scouts by environment directly from the Home page.

Add a Label to a Scout

You create labels in the Scout's configuration window.

1. To access the Labels section:
   • For an existing scout: Go to the Scout's Details page and click Edit**. The Edit Scout window opens, where you can scroll down to the Labels section.
   • For a new Scout: The Labels section is available during the Scout creation process.
2. In the Labels section, select Add label.
3. Enter a label key in the Key field. If existing keys are available, select one from the dropdown list.
4. Enter label value in the Value field. If existing values for the selected key are available, select one from the dropdown list.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 for as many labels as you want to add to the Scout.
6. Save the Scout configuration.

After adding the label, you can now use it to filter the Scouts on the Home page. You can also remove labels from a Scout in its configuration window.