Monitoring non-public user journeys

A private Synthetic Monitoring Zone (STM zone) allows you to monitor your user journeys on internal domains or networks specific to your organization. To do this, a probe must be deployed inside your infrastructure. You can also use a probe to obtain personalized recommendations to optimize your website. The probes are able to cache their results to cover for an eventual temporary network outage.

Prerequisites

• A machine inside your infrastructure to host the probe. The machine must be able to access the application you will monitor.
• A user journey configured on the internal application to monitor.

Step 1: Create a new STM zone

1. From the Global View, open the site selector in the top-left corner and select your organization’s page.

2. On your organization’s configuration page, click the Synthetic Monitoring Zones tab.

3. Click + New Synthetic Monitoring Zone. Give the zone a meaningful name (e.g., Paris Office) then click + Create.

Your new zone now appears in the list.

Step 2: Obtain a probe token

While remaining inside the organization page, open the Tokens tab. Click Create a token and follow the steps to create a probe token.

Save your token. You will need it to create the probe in the next step.

Step 3: Associate a probe to the STM zone

Click Associate a probe to the right of your zone. A window with multiple commands opens. Execute the Docker command to log in to the registry.

Step 4: Create and launch the probe

STM probe

STM probes collect the standard performance metrics that Experience Monitoring uses.

1. To create and launch the STM probe, execute the STM probe command you obtained at step 3 with the probe token.

2. Refresh the page: once launched, the probe is automatically saved and appears to the right of the associated zone in the Synthetic Monitoring Zones list.

Recommendations probe

Recommendation probes run once a day to make personalized suggestions on how to optimize your website.

1. To create and launch the recommendations probe, execute the recommendations probe command you obtained at step 3 with the probe token.

2. Refresh the page: once launched, the probe is automatically saved and appears to the right of the associated zone in the Synthetic Monitoring Zones list. Recommendation probes have a binoculars icon to distinguish them from STM probes.

Note that it takes up to 24 hours for the probe to gather enough data to start sending recommendations.

Step 5: Associate the zone with a user journey

1. Go to Configuration and select the User Journeys tab.

2. On the journey you want to run from your private zone, click on the three dots on the right, then click on Advanced.

3. In the Advanced configuration window, scroll down to the Synthetic Monitoring Zones section. Your private zone appears under Private Zones. Select it and click Save.

After a short while, the probe will run its first check and your internal journey monitoring will be operational. You can analyze it just like a regular user journey.

If you are running into any issues, try our user journey troubleshooting guide.