Management Guide for the Synthetic Center of the Elven Platform

The Synthetic Center of the Elven Platform is the core for advanced monitoring of simulated interactions with your digital services. It allows you to configure, manage, and visualize synthetic monitoring that simulates the behavior of real users, ensuring your applications and APIs are always available and functioning as expected. Through periodic checks on URLs and other resources, the Synthetic Center helps identify failures before they impact your customers, promoting high availability and reliability in your operations.

Accessing the Synthetic Center

• Navigate to the main menu and click on Monitoring.

• In the submenu, select the Synthetics item.

Working with the Synthetic Center

Flexibility is one of the pillars of the Synthetic Center. It offers a simplified and accessible interface so you can easily configure monitoring, adjusting parameters such as check intervals, response validations, and automatic notifications. Everything is designed to provide proactive insights, helping you detect issues quickly and take preventive actions efficiently. Whether managing simulated interactions or integrating into a monitored environment, the Synthetic Center delivers full control and an intuitive experience to keep your applications performing at their best.

In the Synthetic Center of the Elven Platform, you can list your configured Synthetics and perform efficient and intuitive management. Each configured Synthetic is displayed clearly and in an organized manner, allowing you to view the status of your applications and APIs in a centralized way. To make navigation easier, there is a search bar by Synthetic name with smart filters built in, allowing you to filter by status. The status filters help you focus on specific resources, such as Inactive, Successful, Pending, or those with Errors. If you need an overview, simply select the All option, which displays all monitoring checks.

Maintenance Window

Still within the Synthetic Center, we have the Maintenance Window, an essential feature for managing planned maintenance periods in your application. During this time, checks are temporarily paused, preventing monitoring, alerts, and notifications from being triggered while you perform updates or adjustments. This allows maintenance to proceed smoothly, without generating unnecessary notifications or false alarms, ensuring your operations continue in an orderly manner without unexpected interruptions in performance reports.

For example, imagine you need to update the payment system of an e-commerce platform by making backend adjustments, such as installing new security certificates. To do this, you can configure a Maintenance Window for a specific time, such as 12/13/2024, from 2:00 PM to 2:30 PM. During this period, the Synthetic Center suspends the checks, preventing the monitoring system from logging temporary failures or triggering false alerts. This way, you can make the necessary changes calmly, knowing that the monitoring system will not be affected during maintenance. This approach ensures that the update is carried out in an organized manner, without affecting the user experience or generating unwanted notifications.

Application Opening Hours

Through the Synthetic Center, you can rely on the Application Opening Hours feature, which allows you to configure your application's operating hours. This functionality is essential for customizing monitoring based on the periods when your application is actually active, avoiding alerts and notifications outside of business hours. This makes monitoring more aligned with your business’s real needs, ensuring more accurate reports and efficient management.

For example, imagine your application operates only from Monday to Friday, between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM. You can configure the Application Opening Hours to reflect this schedule by specifying the working days and time periods. With this setup, the Synthetic Center automatically disables checks outside of those hours, preventing the logging of failures that don’t affect end users and avoiding unnecessary alerts. This approach optimizes performance analysis, focusing only on relevant periods and providing a clearer view of your application’s health during its operational hours.

Creating a Synthetic

Additionally, the Synthetic Center of the Elven Platform was designed to make the configuration of synthetic monitoring simple and efficient. Within it, you can create new Synthetics that simulate interactions with applications or APIs, ensuring that failures are detected before they impact end users. To get started, click the + Synthetic button, give it a descriptive name, choose or create an Environment, and configure parameters such as check frequency and expected responses.

Each step of the process is customizable to meet your specific needs. From setting up health checks for URLs and APIs, to defining HTTP methods (GET or POST), headers, and specific validations. You can also define success conditions for each step based on JSON data, HTTP status codes, or textual responses.

In addition, you can use the Response Template, which automatically generates variables when configured. Simply insert a JSON with your variable names and random values — when the step is executed, the system will create variables with the current values returned by the request response. These variables can be reused in the following steps of the test flow.

Example: If your resource has, for instance, the following JSON format:

{
   "id":1,
   "name":"Bruno Pereira",
   "email":"[email protected]",
}

You can configure the Response Template as follows:

{
   "id":1,
   "name":"Bruno Pereira",
   "email":"[email protected]"
}

With this, the variables [[.id]], [[.name]], and [[.email]] will be created, and can be automatically used in subsequent steps, such as Get User or Update User, without the need to manually copy these values. Keep in mind that you can use any return value from the request in this JSON, such as fields from the header or body. However, these generated variables are temporary (or ephemeral)—whenever the Synthetic configuration is edited, they will be deleted and must be created again during the next execution.

This approach ensures a continuous and automated flow, allowing data to move between steps with speed and consistency.

This means you can, for example, validate all operations of a CRUD (such as create, read, update, and delete) in different steps, sharing the results between them using these variables. The stored variables allow you to reuse data from a previous response as input for the next steps, keeping the flow dynamic, intelligent, and connected.

In addition to all this, with just a few clicks, you can enable automatic incidents, define severity, and notify specific teams, providing proactive and centralized monitoring. Everything is designed to deliver full control, simplifying monitoring and ensuring the reliability of your applications.

Synthetic Steps

In addition to all this, with just a few clicks, you can view the steps of your Synthetic, edit or delete it. Moreover, it's also very easy to access event history and check incidents directly on the timeline. On the Synthetic page, you’ll find relevant information organized in an intuitive way, allowing you to have full control over the steps and events without unnecessary effort.

Glossary of Technical Terms

Synthetic Center: A monitoring tool in the Elven Platform that simulates real user interactions with applications and APIs to ensure high availability and reliability.

Synthetics: Synthetic monitors configured in the Synthetic Center to simulate user behavior and test the integrity of applications and APIs.

Maintenance Window: A feature that temporarily pauses monitoring checks during planned maintenance periods, preventing unnecessary alerts and notifications.

Application Opening Hours: A configuration that defines the operating hours of the application to align monitoring with the times it is active, avoiding alerts outside of business hours.

Steps: Stages configured in a synthetic monitor that simulate specific interactions with an application or API.

Environment: The environment where the Synthetic will run, which can be preconfigured or created during the monitoring setup.

Healthcheck: A periodic check performed on URLs or APIs to ensure they are functioning correctly.

HTTP Methods (GET/POST): Methods used to make requests during the Synthetic simulation, such as retrieving data (GET) or sending information (POST).

Headers: Additional information included in HTTP requests to customize or validate the simulated tests.

Response Template: The expected response model configured to validate the success of a Synthetic step, based on JSON data, status codes, or textual responses.

Status Codes: HTTP codes that indicate the result of the requests made during monitoring (e.g., 200 for success, 404 for not found).

Check Frequency: The time interval configured for the Synthetic to perform new checks on the application or API.

Automatic Incidents: Events automatically created when a Synthetic detects failures, with configurable severity and notifications.

Severity: The level of importance or impact associated with an incident, used to prioritize corrective actions.

Timeline: A chronological view that displays the history of events and incidents related to a synthetic monitor.

Event History: A detailed log of events related to the Synthetic, allowing for incident analysis and tracking.

Status: An indicator that reflects the current condition of a Synthetic, such as Active, Successful, Pending, or Error.