Synthetic monitoring: The road from 2020 to 2021

With the pandemic and the new challenges it posed, it's safe to say we all felt like 2020 was a tumultuous year. In spite of the losses and hurdles we've faced, the resilience of humankind is helping us adapt and keep moving forward. At Zoho, we've adapted, too, and have switched to working remotely to ensure smooth transaction of our services.

With the help of our customers' feedback, we were able to roll out almost all the features we had planned for the year. Here's a quick look at all the releases and enhancements that we made in 2020 along with a glimpse of what's in store for 2021.

In 2020, we've released some new features and enhancements for monitoring capabilities, taking uptime, performance, and security-related aspects into consideration. A few of the notable releases include:

• UDP monitoring to track the availability of your UDP ports from multiple locations. Monitoring UDP ports can ensure smooth streaming of videos and games, and can ensure live broadcasts are uninterrupted.
• Exhaustive security report for updates from multiple monitors including the Real-time Blocklist Check, Brand Reputation, and SSL/TLS. This report consolidates multiple security-related nuances of your domain into a single report, helping you to obtain a complete picture.
• Addition of grade support and vulnerability checks for SSL/TLS monitors. The grading can help you in understanding security-related improvements or measures needed to provide a secure service.
• Alerting option for web page speed monitors when the size of an individual page resource or the size of all the page resources exceeds the set threshold, along with providing an option to view content delivery network (CDN) miss resources, unsecure resources, and time added. This enhancement can help you figure out whether the CDN is optimizing the performance of your website.
• Reduced minimum poll interval for REST API transaction monitors and web page speed monitors to enable quick outage detection and to help in taking swift corrective measures before it affects end users.
• Introduced answer validation for all lookup types for DNS monitors to make checking DNS record values against the resolved DNS records easier. Answer validation can help you in cross-checking your DNS records by receiving alerts in case of any change.

We hope all these enhancements can help in making your monitoring process smoother and better. It was only with your constant support that we were able to fine-tune our features, and we're hoping for the same for 2021.

This is just a gist of all that went out in 2020 from Site24x7 synthetic monitoring. You can get a bigger picture of all the updates from our What's New page. Learn about our product roadmap for 2021, and stay tuned to Site24x7's community to get updates on new releases.

Here's wishing you all a peaceful and happy 2021 from the folks at Site24x7 and Zoho!