Synthetic Monitoring & Uptime

Run your critical journeys against production, continuously, from everywhere.

10 specialist tools0 free or open source2 self-hostable2 usable without code

What this category is really about

Synthetic monitoring is your E2E suite pointed at production on a schedule. It catches the failures no unit test can: an expired certificate, a third-party payment provider that is down, a CDN misconfiguration that only affects Frankfurt.

It pairs with real-user monitoring rather than replacing it. Synthetics give you a consistent baseline and cover paths with no current traffic; RUM tells you what actual users on actual devices experienced. Teams that buy one usually end up needing both.

What to evaluate

Check locations

Multi-region matters if you serve multiple regions. A single US probe will not see your EU outage.

Browser-check authoring

Reusing your existing Playwright scripts as monitors avoids maintaining two versions of the same journey.

Alert routing and noise

Retry-before-alert, maintenance windows and dependency-aware grouping. A flapping monitor trains people to ignore alerts.

Pricing metric

Per check, per run, per location, or bundled into an APM contract. Frequency multiplies the bill.

Common mistakes

Monitoring the homepage and nothing else, then finding out checkout broke from a customer email.
Running a browser check every minute from eight locations and paying more for monitoring than hosting.
Synthetic transactions that pollute production analytics and revenue reporting.

10 tools built for this

Sorted by how widely adopted they are, not by preference. Tick the compare boxes to put two or more side by side.

Filter these

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic checks correlated with APM traces, logs and infrastructure metrics.

from $5No-code

Sentry

Error tracking with stack traces, release attribution and now session replay.

from $26Open sourceSelf-host

Checkly

Monitoring as code: your Playwright scripts, running against production on a schedule.

from $40

Dynatrace

Full-stack observability with automatic dependency mapping and AI root-cause analysis.

from $0.04

New Relic Synthetic Monitoring

Scripted browser and API monitors included in New Relic's usage-based platform.

Free tier

Pingdom

Long-established uptime and transaction monitoring, now part of SolarWinds.

from $10No-code

UptimeRobot

Free uptime monitoring for 50 endpoints. The pragmatic starting point.

from $7

Better Stack

Uptime monitoring, incident management and status pages in one affordable product.

from $29

Grafana Synthetic Monitoring

k6-powered checks inside Grafana Cloud, alongside your existing dashboards.

Free tierOpen sourceSelf-host

StatusCake

Affordable uptime, page-speed, SSL and domain monitoring from many global locations.

from $24

Tools that also cover this

These are built primarily for something else but handle this category as part of a broader platform — often a way to consolidate two subscriptions into one.