Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
Application performance monitoring (APM) tools
Digital experience monitoring (DEM) software
Cloud security monitoring and analytics software
Incident response software
Digital forensics software
Cloud security software
System security software
Monitoring software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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What is Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
Splunk Synthetic Monitoring is a digital experience monitoring product that runs scripted and browser-based synthetic tests to measure availability and performance of web applications and APIs from multiple locations. It is used by SRE, operations, and application teams to detect outages, latency regressions, and user-journey failures before they impact customers. The product integrates with Splunk Observability Cloud for alerting and correlation with metrics, traces, and logs, and supports both API checks and real-browser monitoring for key transactions.
Broad synthetic test coverage
Supports both API-level checks and real-browser tests for multi-step user journeys, which helps teams validate critical transactions beyond simple uptime. Teams can schedule tests from multiple regions to compare performance by geography. This aligns well with organizations that need proactive detection rather than relying only on real-user telemetry.
Tight observability integration
Integrates with Splunk Observability Cloud so synthetic failures can be correlated with infrastructure and application telemetry. This reduces time spent pivoting between separate tools when investigating whether an issue is network, backend, or frontend related. Alerting workflows can route incidents into existing Splunk-based operations processes.
Actionable performance diagnostics
Provides timing breakdowns and failure artifacts (for example, step-level results and browser session evidence) that help identify where a transaction fails. This is useful for validating releases and detecting third-party dependency issues. The focus on repeatable, scripted journeys complements event-based monitoring approaches used elsewhere in the stack.
Best within Splunk ecosystem
The strongest workflows assume use of Splunk Observability Cloud and related Splunk monitoring components. Organizations using a different primary observability platform may not get the same correlation and operational efficiency. This can increase integration effort if teams want a standalone synthetic tool.
Script maintenance overhead
Synthetic journeys require ongoing upkeep when UI flows, selectors, authentication, or third-party widgets change. Teams typically need engineering time to keep scripts stable and to manage test data and credentials. This overhead grows with the number of monitored applications and environments.
Not a security-first platform
While Splunk as a company offers security analytics and incident response products, Synthetic Monitoring itself is primarily designed for availability and experience testing. It does not replace dedicated cloud security monitoring, digital forensics, or endpoint/system security tooling. Security use cases generally require additional Splunk security products and data sources beyond synthetic test results.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go Free tier/trial: Free trial available (14-day free trial; no credit card required). Example costs:
- Synthetic Monitoring (uptime requests) – $1 per 10,000 uptime requests.
- Browser Synthetics (add-on / per test location) – $12 per month, per test location (billed annually). Discount options / notes: Contact Sales for pricing details, enterprise/volume pricing, and potential discounts. Billing examples on site indicate annual billing for many Observability plans/add-ons.
Seller details
Cisco Systems, Inc.
San Jose, California, USA
1984
Public
https://www.cisco.com/
https://x.com/Cisco
https://www.linkedin.com/company/cisco/
