You can’t fix what you can’t see—and by the time real users start reporting failures, it’s already too late. Synthetic monitoring changes that equation.
By continuously generating simulated traffic from multiple locations targeting your APIs, synthetic checks let you detect issues before anyone opens a support ticket. And with Dash0, synthetic monitoring isn’t just a checkbox—it’s integrated deep into your observability stack, giving you the full context needed to debug quickly and confidently.
Here’s how it works—and why it matters.
Set up in seconds
Most synthetic monitoring tools make you jump through hoops—scripts, configuration files, complex flows.
With Dash0, you can be fully operational in under a minute. Just add the URL!
Spot trouble before it spreads
Synthetic checks continuously hit your most important services. If something’s slow, down, or unstable, Dash0 flags it immediately—before it ripples out to affect real users.
That means less user frustration. And fewer “Is this down?” messages in Slack.
Test like your users, worldwide
Outages don’t always happen at the core. Sometimes they only affect users in one location or one cloud zone.
Dash0 synthetic checks can run from multiple locations. You can add more locations with a single click. Whether your users are in Frankfurt or Singapore, you’ll know exactly how your services perform for them.
Built-in uptime and SSL certificate validation
Synthetic monitoring doesn’t stop at custom API flows. Dash0 includes essential checks—like uptime monitoring and SSL certificate expiration alerts—right out of the box.
Deep integrated with tracing
We want Dash0 to feel like an integrated, cohesive experience. So when we set out to build synthetic monitoring, we of course expected to integrate it with Tracing. What we did not imagine at the onset, is how deeply we would manage to do it.
From each trace, you can see whether it originates from a synthetic check or a Website Monitoring session. But it’s not just traces: from every span at any depth of any trace, you can tell if a synthetic check triggered it and which one it was. This allows you to be able to, for example:
- Exclude during an outage any invocation of your services that are triggered by synthetic checks, focusing only on the real users
- Consume synthetic check information inside Triage, so that if the problem is, for example, the payload of a certain synthetic check, you’ll see it clearly
- Check whether specific operation of a service deep into your system are “covered” by synthetic checks or not
Infrastructure as code
The Dash0 Terraform Provider already supports managing synthetic checks as Infrastructure as Code, and soon the Dash0 Operator for Kubernetes will as well.
Monitoring that thinks like you do
With Dash0, synthetic monitoring isn’t about just pinging a URL—it’s about understanding your system end-to-end, proactively catching issues, and giving your team the visibility they need to stay ahead.
Ready to see it in action?
