Akamai mPulse vs Sematext Synthetics comparison

Akamai mPulse is a real user monitoring (RUM) solution that gives performance engineers, administrators, and developers the ability to effortlessly visualize website functionality issues and identify ways to improve processes that conventional testing protocols do not find. mPulse gives users usable scenarios to better understand how processes such as user interactions, visual progress, and third-party resources may be disrupting the overall user experience and application delivery.

mPulse enables users to take a deep dive into the specific performance issues and complete comprehensive error analyses, to thoroughly understand the effect on critical user interactions such as conversions, page views, and more.

mPulse gathers and delivers data on an organization's website’s performance and metrics on user web browsing experiences. The mPulse feature “Boomerang” is a JavaScript Library that monitors the website page load time. Boomerang has a unique plugin architecture and works with all websites. The Boomerang feature is embedded on each page of an organization's website.

mPulse works seamlessly with Akamai solution Ion, so the RUM data can be instantly gathered once the Luna Control Center has been activated. Ion instantly attaches Boomerang to the organization’s web properties; there is no need to change the website code.

Akamai mPulse Benefits

• Third-party monitoring: mPulse enables users to effortlessly monitor and visualize the effect that third-party vendors, resources, and scripts may have on the organization’s web properties.
  
  
• Real-time intuitions: RUM data is continually being gathered, so users are able to instantly experience changes in user performance during every critical event. Users are able to respond immediately and make corrections or amendments as needed. Additionally, mPulse integrates effectively with other third-party notification solutions, such as Slack, PagerDuty, and webhook API support.
  
  
• Framework integrations: mPulse integrates with many of today’s popular single-page application (SPA) frameworks, such as React.js, Backbone.js, Angular.js, Ember.js, and even some custom frameworks. mPulse has the ability to also be seamlessly integrated in Non-SPA websites.
  
  
• Intuitive feedback: mPulse gathers data and creates workable solutions so users have a better understanding of how objects, images, or even entire pages are affecting user behavior. Users can gather numerous metrics (custom or advanced) to achieve a better, more complete understanding of ways to improve the user experience with the application or website.
  
  
• Custom metrics and timers: With mPulse, users can effortlessly create custom timers to discover important performance sessions unique to the application. The mPulse dashboard allows users to set up trackers for numerous metrics, such as:
  
  
  • First image load time
  • Sidebar load time
  • Page load times
  • Third-party resource content load time
    
    
• mPulse Beacon API: This valuable benefit allows users to send custom metrics from mobile and web applications to mPulse. This gives mPulse greater flexibility and usability to frameworks and platforms that can make HTTP calls. Representational State Transfer (REST) interface is included and is able to be used by any web application using any language running on the platform. There is also a Beacon API library for JavaScript. This option is available from the dashboard by creating a new application and an API key.

Sematext Synthetics provides the ability to actively monitor APIs, Web URLs, websites, and user journeys/click flows from multiple locations around the globe. Synthetic monitoring helps you ensure the availability and performance of your APIs and websites. Synthetics will help you identify downtime and performance issues by simulating user requests and interactions with your web page.

No agent installation is required and there is no need to change your application code.

Sematext Synthetic Benefits

• Fix performance issues before they affect your end users
  Synthetic monitoring allows you to simulate user interactions at different locations worldwide. Synthetic performance monitoring monitors all your APIs, web applications, and mobile apps, no matter how many users they are. With Sematext, you can customize Dashboards and Alerts to monitor critical infrastructure aspects and trigger them when they malfunction. This will help you spot problems before they arise.
  

• Benchmark your website
  Synthetic monitoring solutions let you look at your APIs from different places during the day. Then you can use this data as a baseline for benchmarking since it helps you figure out what needs to be improved, and lets you compare your service to the competition.
  
• Test your scaling capabilities
  A website and application are built to respond quickly to users, but your server needs to be ready when traffic spikes unexpectedly. You can run artificial tests to determine how your server will behave under load with synthetic performance monitoring. Once you have this data, you can decide what steps to take to scale gracefully.
  
  
• Test new product features before launching
  If you're launching new features, synthetic monitoring lets you run a full test suite before releasing them during peak hours, which is a great tool to have. You'll be able to see how the application reacts under load and whether any of the recent changes will impact a 3rd party API you might use.
  
  
• Monitor third-party APIs and critical business processes
  If you don't use any third-party tools in your business, you run into a number of problems related to their availability. You need to keep an eye on them and get an alert the second things start to slow down. Monitoring API metrics is not enough to ensure your users get the best experience possible. Make sure your application works as expected, including logging in, searching, and checkout.
  
  
• Ensure SLA compliance
  Whatever side of the SLA you are on – the key is to make sure everyone in the contract adheres to the contract. To understand the performance limitations of your application and set realistic expectations, you should use synthetic monitoring tools if you're a service provider. Customers want to know that the vendor can fulfill his promises.
  
  
• Reduce MTTR
  With synthetic monitoring software like Sematext Synthetics, you can lower your MTTR by sending out alerts before the issue becomes a problem. In addition to being notified sooner, you'll also learn what's causing the problem and how to fix it.

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Just some of the things you can do with Sematext Synthetics

• Monitor & track the availability & performance of APIs
• Monitor SSL certificate expiration time
• Monitor websites and track various web performance metrics like page load time, paint metrics, etc.
• Monitor website uptime
• Monitor individual resource performance in a website by domain, type, and response code
• Create public status page showing the availability of your selected web services and share it with your customers
• Identify slow resources
• Monitor third-party resources performance
• Investigate slow pages & identify bottlenecks using a waterfall chart
• Create user journeys with custom assertions based on the content of the webpage
• Collect and track custom metrics from your sites
• Benchmark against competitors
• Create custom dashboards and alerts based on gathered performance metrics
• Debug downtime with end-to-end visibility of application performance
• Get alerted when things fail via multiple alert channels like email, Slack, Pagerduty, webhooks, etc.
• Monitor websites behind firewalls and on private networks with Private Locations
• Check out the full product update.

At Sematext, we’ve also had the need to monitor application availability. We use Synthetics actively to monitor our own applications and it has helped us uncover issues with our APIs on multiple occasions.

Where to go from here?

Sign up for a free trial and try it for yourself. Pricing starts at $2 per month for HTTP monitors and $7 per month for browser monitors. We have pay-as-you-go pricing if your usage changes or fixed plans if you can estimate your usage.