Synthetic Clickpaths are your digital spies, proactively probing your applications from the outside to ensure everything’s running and performing as expected.
Here’s a synthetic clickpath in action, simulating a user navigating an e-commerce site:
{
"name": "E-commerce Checkout Flow",
"steps": [
{
"type": "navigate",
"url": "https://www.example-shop.com/"
},
{
"type": "click",
"selector": "a[data-testid='category-link-electronics']"
},
{
"type": "click",
"selector": "div[data-testid='product-item-123']"
},
{
"type": "click",
"selector": "button[data-testid='add-to-cart']"
},
{
"type": "navigate",
"url": "https://www.example-shop.com/cart"
},
{
"type": "click",
"selector": "button[data-testid='checkout-button']"
}
],
"locations": ["US_EAST_1", "EU_WEST_2"],
"frequency": "5m"
}
This JSON defines a test that first lands on the homepage, clicks a link to the electronics category, selects a specific product, adds it to the cart, navigates to the cart page, and finally clicks the checkout button. It runs every 5 minutes from servers in US_EAST_1 and EU_WEST_2.
The core problem synthetic clickpaths solve is the "blind spot" between your internal monitoring and the actual user experience. You might have servers up and databases responding, but a broken JavaScript file or a slow API call can render your application unusable for your customers. Clickpaths simulate real user journeys, catching these front-end and end-to-end issues before they impact actual users. They provide a consistent, objective measure of availability and performance from the user’s perspective, independent of your internal network or infrastructure health.
Internally, Dynatrace’s synthetic monitoring executes these defined clickpaths from various geographic locations using browser instances. It records the entire interaction, measuring load times for each step, identifying JavaScript errors, and verifying that the correct content is displayed. This data is then correlated with your application’s performance metrics, providing a unified view of user experience. You control the complexity of the journey, the specific elements to interact with (using CSS selectors or XPath), the frequency of execution, and the geographical origins of the tests.
The most surprising thing about synthetic clickpaths is how often they reveal problems that don’t manifest as typical server errors or resource exhaustion. A subtle change in a third-party script, a race condition in client-side code, or a misconfiguration in a CDN can silently degrade performance or break functionality for a subset of users, yet your backend might appear perfectly healthy. Dynatrace’s ability to capture detailed waterfall charts and front-end errors for each synthetic step is crucial here, allowing you to pinpoint the exact moment and reason for failure, often down to specific DOM elements or JavaScript exceptions.
The next logical step after setting up synthetic clickpaths is to integrate them with your alerting and incident management systems, ensuring that failures trigger immediate notifications and automated remediation workflows.