Synthetic monitoring tools for synthetic transaction monitoring and the best synthetic monitoring software, priced per check

where they win

New Relic wins outright on plain ping

New Relic ping monitors are free and unlimited on every edition, which beats Datadog, Dynatrace, Checkly and us for that one job. The $0.005 rate in the table applies only to non-ping checks. If a plain reachability ping is genuinely all you need and you already run New Relic, stop reading and use it.

where they win

Splunk folds uptime checks into the host fee

Splunk's pricing page no longer publishes a per-request rate. Synthetic uptime monitoring is included in every Observability Cloud bundle, from $15 per host a month billed annually, with no per-check allowance or overage rate published. If you already pay for Splunk hosts, extra uptime checks may add nothing to the invoice. If you do not, the entry cost is the bundle, and checks floor at one minute.

where meters hurt

Interval is a price, not a setting

On a metered tool, halving the interval doubles the bill, so budget quietly pushes teams onto five-minute checks. That matters: one missed five-minute check is 5 minutes of unrecorded downtime, which is 114% of the entire 4m 23s monthly budget of a 99.99% target. The cheap interval cannot evidence the SLA you promised.

What is synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring runs scripted requests against your site or API from outside your infrastructure, on a schedule, whether or not real users are active. A probe sends the request, checks the response against rules you set, and alerts when the rules fail. It is active measurement, which is why it detects an outage at 4am on a Sunday when no real traffic exists to reveal one.

What is synthetic transaction monitoring?

Synthetic transaction monitoring drives a real headless browser through a multi-step user journey such as login, search, add to cart and checkout, then asserts that every step completed. It proves the funnel works rather than that the homepage loads. It is the most expensive class of synthetic check because each run costs browser compute, typically $0.004 to $0.012 per execution.

Can you find a platform that offers both synthetic and real-user monitoring for under $100 a month?

Yes, on consumption pricing at small volume. On Dynatrace list price, two HTTP monitors every 5 minutes from two locations cost $35.07 a month and 20,000 real user sessions at $2.25 per 1,000 cost $45.00, so $80.07 together, drawn from an annual commitment. The catch is that both meters grow with traffic and check frequency, so the same setup at one-minute checks is already over $200. See Dynatrace synthetic monitoring pricing for the per-check math.

How does synthetic monitoring work?

A probe in a data center runs your check on a fixed interval, records the status code, latency and response body, and compares them against your assertions. If an assertion fails, most tools retry or confirm from another region before raising an incident, then notify by SMS, email, Slack or webhook. The result is a continuous availability record independent of your own servers.

How much does synthetic monitoring cost?

Metered tools charge $0.00018 to $0.005 per HTTP check and $0.004 to $0.012 per browser run, so one endpoint checked every minute for a month is roughly $8 to $220 depending on the vendor, and one browser journey at the same interval is $175 to $526. Flat-plan tools remove the meter entirely and price by monitor count instead, from $49 a month.

What are the best synthetic monitoring tools?

It depends on which of the three check types you actually need. Checkly leads for Playwright-based transaction monitoring, Datadog and Dynatrace lead when failures must correlate with traces, New Relic wins for free plain ping, Splunk bundles uptime checks into its host fee, and flat-plan tools like AlertPing win once you need dozens of endpoints watched at a short interval.

What is the difference between synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring is active and runs on a schedule from a fixed probe, so it works with zero traffic and gives a clean, comparable baseline. Real user monitoring is passive and reports what actual visitors experienced, including their devices and networks. RUM cannot detect an outage nobody is awake to hit, and synthetic cannot tell you the site is slow on a specific carrier. Most teams need synthetic first.

Is there a platform with both synthetic and real user monitoring for under $100 a month?

Yes. Site24x7 Professional costs $49 a month, or $42 billed annually, and bundles 20 website monitors at a 1-minute interval with 100,000 real user monitoring page views, so a small team gets both for under $100. AlertPing does not do RUM. Team at $59 a month checks 100 URLs and APIs every 30 seconds and confirms each failure from a second region, which pairs with any RUM snippet you already run.

Do I need synthetic monitoring if I already have uptime monitoring?

Uptime monitoring is a form of synthetic monitoring, the cheapest one. You need the more expensive kinds only when a working URL is not sufficient proof: a checkout that silently fails at the payment step, an API that returns 200 with an empty array, a login that breaks after a session change. If those failure modes would cost you money, add scripted checks on top rather than replacing what you have.

How often should synthetic checks run?

Match the interval to the availability target you promised, because one missed check is the smallest outage you can record. A 99.99% target allows 4 minutes 23 seconds a month, so a five-minute interval cannot evidence it: a single failed check already exceeds the whole budget. Thirty seconds is the practical floor for SLA reporting, and browser journeys can run far slower because they are checking correctness rather than reachability.