When a customer complains that “the phones keep cutting out” or that “the video meetings are glitchy,” you know the pain of trying to track down the cause. Is it the internet provider? The PBX? The router? Maybe a burst of packet loss somewhere between branch offices? By the time you find the culprit, the customer’s already frustrated.
That’s why forward-thinking telecom pros are turning to a smarter, more proactive way to catch problems before users ever notice them. It’s called synthetic monitoring, and instead of waiting for real users to experience issues, it creates artificial “test calls” and “test meetings” that continuously check system performance from different points on the network. Think of it as a team of virtual users constantly making sure that every part of your VoIP and UC infrastructure is healthy and ready for the real thing.
In this article, we explain how synthetic monitoring works, how it differs from traditional passive monitoring, and why it's becoming an essential part of reliable VoIP and UC deployments. Understanding this approach can help you reduce downtime, speed up troubleshooting, and deliver a better experience all around.
What is synthetic monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring is a technique for proactively monitoring, testing, and evaluating the operation of a network and its services. Sometimes called active monitoring, it uses scripted probes to emulate real user actions from various locations on the network. These probes measure and monitor availability, performance, reliability, and a whole series of service-specific metrics.
Synthetic monitoring entails monitoring a network or service by generating artificial traffic and scripted transactions. The name “synthetic monitoring” comes from the fact that the traffic is emulated, not real, so it is synthetic. This contrasts with conventional monitoring, which is considered passive in this context. Passive monitoring involves observing network operation and accumulating metrics resulting from real user traffic.
Synthetic monitoring for VoIP and UC
VoIP and UC services are network applications that can benefit significantly from synthetic monitoring. These real-time services are susceptible to network phenomena beyond simple outages, making troubleshooting them often difficult. Packet loss, jitter, and network congestion are often unseen culprits that can plague VoIP and UC systems, and they can be challenging to identify when observed acting upon real user traffic. These problems are usually accompanied by user complaints, network administrator headaches, and support tickets that cause interruptions because they must be dealt with immediately.
Synthetic monitoring for VoIP and UC can address such issues proactively and in a controlled manner. It can be configured to periodically simulate varying traffic loads, user behaviors, and application workflows, including SIP device/client registrations, call setups and teardowns, DTMF entries through IVRs and contact centers, PSTN origination and termination, and WebRTC meeting joins with audio and video screen sharing.
Through tightly controlled testing parameters, synthetic monitoring can simulate excessive user registration attempts on VoIP and UC servers. It can reproduce high network congestion scenarios by initiating many simultaneous high-definition, high-throughput video calls while monitoring the network’s response. And it can do all of this without actual user participation.
Scripted transactions can be initiated from various locations and through different connection types (including branch offices and Wi-Fi clients), through VPN paths, and from cloud vantage points. This way, latency, jitter, packet loss, MOS scores, and join times can all be safely evaluated under a controlled testing environment without affecting real end-user experiences. Per-site baselines can then be established, and degradations can be detected before users notice.
Because the tests are repeatable, they help reproduce elusive faults, isolate whether the problem lies in the LAN, WAN, ISP, or UCaaS provider, and accumulate objective data for faster and more informed incident response.
How synthetic monitoring is implemented
Synthetic monitoring is done using software agents, also called probes or sensors, that emulate real user behavior. They can run on the cloud, at the network edge, at office branches, data centers, points of presence, on local appliances, or even using lightweight services running on the end-user devices themselves.
How and where they are deployed depends heavily on the specific monitoring goals and the monitoring platform, but the underlying principle is the same. Agents execute scripted workflows on a schedule, measure network and service behavior, and send results to a centralized controller.
The controller processes and evaluates the results and alerts administrators about detected service degradation, predicted service oversubscriptions, or adverse network conditions. The accumulated synthetic monitoring data also creates a detailed service and network operational history.
Advantages of synthetic monitoring
There are several advantages to synthetic monitoring. Some are obvious while others are not immediately perceivable.
Monitoring independently of the user
Among the most obvious advantages is the fact that you can stress-test the network and the VoIP and UC services, reproducing extreme conditions, without having actual users experience service degradation or outages. The network’s limits and VoIP and UC service capacities can be evaluated by simulating adverse scenarios, resulting in a real (not just theoretical) assessment of the maximum capacity the network can reach.
Viewing various vantage points
Synthetic monitoring can evaluate the network and its services from a variety of points of view. Agents with an end-user vantage point can accurately record the user’s quality of experience (QoE) by obtaining metrics just like any other end user. Similarly, cloud, network edge, and remote site vantage points can also be evaluated, giving a more complete picture of the real quality of the VoIP and UC service being offered.
Monitoring extreme conditions
Synthetic monitoring can be used to simulate network conditions that do not occur often under regular operation. These include an unusually high volume of network traffic and user transactions. A wide range of failure scenarios can also be evaluated, including packet loss bursts, jitter spikes, increased latency, and link failovers, to name a few. In this way, network and service performance and resilience can be fully evaluated and tested before users are impacted.
Network design and service validation
Synthetic monitoring lets you validate your VoIP and UC systems end to end by running scripted calls and meetings from multiple locations on a schedule. You can spot problems early, reproduce them on demand, and gather objective evidence for decisions.
UC and VoIP monitoring elements
When applied to UC and VoIP, synthetic monitoring typically provides:
- Proactivity: Active probes detect problems like jitter, packet loss, registration failures, low bitrate video, signaling failures, and network congestion much faster than users can. Significantly reducing mean time to detection (MTTD) means that problems can be identified, diagnosed, and resolved before users experience them.
- Repeatable diagnostics: Elusive faults can be pinpointed much more quickly by repeating diagnostics in different locations and under varying conditions, so it’s possible to zero in on the culprit much more quickly.
- Baselines and trend analysis: Baselines for specific locations and services can be established, and synthetic monitoring data can be compared directly with them, eliminating false alarms so problems can be identified more accurately.
- Path and QoS assurance: Active monitoring helps ensure that voice, video, and signaling data take the intended end-to-end paths and receive the correct QoS treatment along the way.
Broader monitoring strategy
Synthetic monitoring is not a standalone solution; it must complement a broader monitoring strategy. It does not replace more conventional real-time user monitoring (RUM) but should be used in conjunction with it to deliver a more comprehensive and data-rich monitoring approach.
Synthetic monitoring helps determine if a system can work right now under controlled conditions, while RUM demonstrates how it behaves for real users. Together, these two sides of the same coin provide a complete picture of the state of the network and its services.
Conclusion
Synthetic monitoring offers continuous, controlled visibility that turns vague “call quality issues” into actionable, measurable findings before they become user-visible incidents. Today’s enterprises cannot afford to be without fully functional communications infrastructure for even a moment, and synthetic monitoring is a practical path to higher reliability and improved resilience.
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