01 Pain Points and Challenges
As enterprises fully embrace the wave of digital transformation, the proportion of online business continues to grow, naturally giving rise to a series of critical issues and challenges that urgently need to be addressed:
Non-Intrusive Monitoring of Core Business Systems: For an enterprise's core business systems—such as payment systems, trading systems, e-commerce systems, and login systems—how can non-intrusive probing mechanisms be employed to accurately capture the real-time operational status of these critical systems?
Stability Assurance for External Service Integrations: How can enterprises ensure that their business systems function properly when relying on external services (such as payment applications and shopping applications) to safeguard business continuity?
Cross-Regional Network Environment Simulation and Testing: How can real-world network environments be simulated to test application availability across different regions and network conditions, proactively identifying and resolving network issues to enhance user experience?
Comprehensive Performance Monitoring and Optimization Recommendations: How can comprehensive performance monitoring be conducted for websites, API endpoints, and service port statuses—collecting metrics such as availability, response time, and packet loss rate—to provide enterprises with actionable network quality optimization recommendations?
This article will explore how to effectively leverage Network Service Synthetic Monitoring (also known as "black-box monitoring") in real-world enterprise operational scenarios to address and resolve these key challenges emerging from digital transformation.
02 Core Product Features
Multi-Perspective Synthetic Monitoring Views
For enterprises—whether managing a handful or hundreds of business services—having a comprehensive and clear overview of the health status of each business website and service is one of the most critical responsibilities for those in charge. At the same time, to ensure information security, individual business personnel need to be isolated based on their permissions to prevent unauthorized access.
The CanWay BlueWhale Full-Stack Observability Center (hereinafter referred to as the "Observability Center"), serving as a comprehensive IT monitoring platform, demonstrates exceptional capability in addressing this complex requirement. Through its Network Service Synthetic Monitoring view, it precisely displays alert data and the tasks with the lowest availability within each user's authorized business scope, based on their business permissions.
If a task with 0% availability is identified, users can directly access the task details to view trend charts for availability, response time, and other metrics. They can also directly associate monitoring policies to quickly configure monitoring alerts and notify the relevant personnel for troubleshooting and resolution.
For enterprises like Tencent, a major player in the gaming industry, ensuring service stability and delivering an outstanding user experience is paramount when managing large-scale global gaming operations. The Observability Center plays a critical role in supporting such business needs. Through global multi-node detection, operations teams can select detection nodes and carriers across various domestic and international locations for probing. This enables the gaming operations team to gain intuitive insights into node response times and availability across different regions, allowing them to perform targeted network monitoring and optimization in specific areas to ensure business stability and a seamless user experience.
Cross-Regional Node Configuration
When enterprises have requirements for detection nodes both domestically and internationally, configuring synthetic monitoring nodes is straightforward—any machine with the BlueKing Agent installed can serve as a monitoring node, supporting both Windows and Linux operating systems. Node machines can be configured according to region and carrier, making the setup of synthetic monitoring nodes quick and effortless.
Network Service Synthetic Monitoring Types
① HTTP(S) Synthetic Monitoring
For scenarios where enterprises need to verify whether web pages are accessible, whether backend APIs respond correctly, or validate the SSL/TLS certificate validity of HTTPS websites, the Observability Center supports a wide range of parameter configurations—including headers, body, tokens, and username/password authentication—to facilitate HTTP(S) synthetic monitoring via both GET and POST methods.
② TCP/UDP Port Monitoring
For common port monitoring scenarios, the Observability Center typically focuses on server monitoring—detecting whether specific ports on servers (such as 80, 443, 22, etc.) are open and available. It can also probe the default ports of common databases and middleware to ensure components are running properly (e.g., MySQL 3306, Redis 6379, Oracle 1521, etc.).
The Observability Center can also verify whether a service can establish a connection through the TCP three-way handshake process—for example, checking the health status of critical services such as web servers and mail servers. The UDP protocol, on the other hand, enables faster and more efficient detection of network fluctuations and packet loss for voice and video streaming services. Through TCP/UDP synthetic monitoring, potential issues can be quickly identified and resolved, improving user experience and service quality.
③ICMP (Ping) Monitoring
When diagnosing network issues or reporting error messages, ICMP synthetic monitoring can effectively detect and identify network communication problems with hosts. By configuring one or more pings, it helps assess packet connectivity, packet loss rate, round-trip time, and other conditions.
Monitoring Policies
The Observability Center allows users to configure corresponding monitoring policies for synthetic monitoring tasks, providing robust alert management capabilities. These policies support three built-in alert severity levels—Critical, Warning, and Informational—along with eight detection algorithms (static threshold, year-over-year/period-over-period comparison, year-over-year/period-over-period amplitude, and year-over-year range). Additional features include no-data alerts, alert trigger conditions, and recovery condition settings.
03 Conclusion
Through Network Service Synthetic Monitoring, enterprises can achieve full-stack observability over critical systems—monitoring availability and performance in real time to ensure every user enjoys a smooth and uninterrupted access experience. Whether it's detecting network latency, monitoring server health, or preventing potential failures, synthetic monitoring empowers users to proactively take countermeasures before problems occur. Through continuous monitoring and data analysis, businesses gain complete visibility into their operational status, providing robust support for service optimization and user satisfaction improvement.
