Gain deeper insight into the user experience delivered by your operations with the DataMiner Synthetic Testing app

Media and broadband services are moving more and more towards on-demand and personalized consumption. Because of this, traditional data collection using polling or streaming telemetry becomes insufficient to obtain the necessary 360° view on the quality of service and experience delivered through your network.

That’s where the brand-new DataMiner Synthetic Testing app comes in. This upcoming DataMiner application automates any imaginable active testing process. This includes testing availability and performance of services, applications, software systems, APIs and much more. The DataMiner Synthetic Testing app increases visibility, speeds up fault detection and root cause analysis, and proactively detects service and UX degradations before end users are affected.

As media and broadband services are moving more and more from a push-based consumption model (think broadcast) towards pull-based (on-demand) consumption, measuring quality of service and experience using only traditional passive monitoring no longer meets the needs.

This is because, in a pull-based consumption model, the network is only carrying services that have been requested by consumers. Without this consumer demand, there are no signals running on the network, and therefore, quality cannot be measured. Next to that, the delivery of these media and broadband services relies more than ever on generic IT services and applications of which the performance is hard to effectively monitor in a passive way (e.g. DHCP response times).

Synthetic testing bridges these gaps by actively testing services, applications and devices. By simulating behavior at regular time intervals – or on request of the operator or help desk – synthetic testing monitors service availability, performance and functional status even at times when there is no real consumption happening in the network (yet). This helps to proactively detect performance degradations in the network, even before users start experiencing them! Because of this advantage, synthetic testing has made its way into processes from all operational domains: from engineering and service design all the way up to the service desk and incident management.

The DataMiner Synthetic Testing app makes it easy to integrate active testing into your operation. The app comes with a catalog of out-of-the-box test activities (including ping test, HTTP test, DNS test, etc.) that you can readily deploy. Tests can be scheduled to be executed at regular intervals, can be manually triggered for instant testing and troubleshooting, or can run upon any other event in the DataMiner system (e.g. after an alarm has been raised).

You can then specify the “targets” to be tested. As always with DataMiner, you can test any service, application or piece of infrastructure, independently from any vendor or technology. Once the test process has been specified and test targets have been selected, the test can be deployed with a click of a button, without having to install any daemons or SDKs on test targets. The app offers a true DevOps environment that allows easy reconfiguration of existing tests at run-time. The results of all tests can be monitored and analyzed through a set of dashboards that allow comparison and aggregation of test results over time, testing resources, test targets etc.

In addition to the tests that can be found out of the box in the DataMiner catalog, users can also create their own tests (using DataMiner Automation scripts). Moreover, the app integrates with third-party Test & Measurement (T&M) tools and enables robotic automation of the most sophisticated tests. Watch out for this new app in the first half of 2021!