<b>Q: Should I use synthetic monitoring or real-user monitoring?</b>

<b>Q: Should I use synthetic monitoring or real-user monitoring?</b>

A: They answer different questions, so most serious setups run both. Synthetic monitoring fires scripted checks on a schedule from your chosen locations. It's your alarm clock: it catches an outage at 3am when nobody's on the site, and it's consistent enough to measure trends.

Real-user monitoring (RUM) reports what actual visitors experience, on their real devices and networks. It's your reality check: it catches the broken checkout that only fails on Safari in Brazil, which no synthetic script was watching.

Practical split: use synthetic for uptime, SLA proof, and paging. Use RUM for performance, regional problems, and "works for me" disputes. If budget forces one, pick synthetic first, because you can't get a 3am page from RUM when zero users are awake to generate data.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.