How to Set Up Synthetic Monitoring

6 min read Observability

Synthetic monitoring proactively tests your endpoints from multiple global locations on a schedule. It catches outages, SSL issues, and performance degradation before real users are affected.

Steps

Navigate to Synthetic Tests

Go to Observability > Synthetic Monitoring and click New Test.

Choose test type

Nova supports several test types:

HTTP — check endpoint availability and response time
SSL Certificate — monitor certificate expiry
DNS — verify DNS resolution
Browser — run headless browser tests for user journeys

Configure the test

For an HTTP test, enter the URL and set assertions:

URL: https://api.example.com/health Method: GET Assertions: - Status code is 200 - Response time < 500ms - Body contains "healthy"

Select check locations

Choose from 30+ global locations to run your tests. Select locations closest to your users for realistic latency measurements. Examples: US East, EU West, Asia Pacific, South America.

Set the check interval

Choose how often to run the test: every 1, 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes. More frequent checks catch outages faster but consume more of your plan quota.

Tip:

Start with 5-minute intervals for critical endpoints (login, checkout, API health) and 15-minute intervals for less critical pages.

Configure failure alerts

Set up alerts to notify your team when a synthetic test fails. You can require failures from multiple locations before triggering to avoid false positives from regional network issues.

Review results

After saving, the test runs immediately. View results on the Synthetic Monitoring dashboard to see uptime, response time trends, and failure history.

Ready to get started?

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