Scale and architect a Synthetics deployment

Use these advanced considerations when you use the Synthetics app for large and complex use cases.

Previously, the Synthetics UI couldn’t display data from remote clusters through CCS/CCR, so this setup was discouraged. However, synthetics now includes a built-in cross-cluster search integration that lets you view monitor data from remote Elasticsearch clusters alongside your local monitors, directly in the Synthetics UI.

This view is read-only, meaning that the integration queries each remote cluster’s synthetics-* data indices at query time, but monitor definitions and settings stay as saved objects on the Kibana where they were created (saved objects aren’t shared across clusters). To create, edit, or delete those monitors, manage them directly in the Synthetics UI on the remote Kibana.

To enable it, go to Synthetics app → Settings → Remote clusters. You can select which remote clusters to query and which Kibana spaces the settings apply to. Refer to Remote clusters for details.

Do not use cross-cluster search (CCS) or cross-cluster replication (CCR) to federate Synthetics data across deployments. The Synthetics UI manages monitors and settings as Kibana saved objects. Because these saved objects are not shared using CCS or CCR, the Synthetics UI doesn't show remote monitor data when you configure CCS or CCR directly. Use the Synthetics app on the cluster where the monitors are defined.

You can, however, use Dashboards or Discover with CCS to query synthetics-* indices directly.

The Synthetics app is designed for active synthetic checks against user-defined URLs and user journeys. It is not intended for infrastructure or Kubernetes pod monitoring through autodiscovery.

The Synthetics UI only shows monitors that are explicitly created and managed through the Synthetics UI or a Synthetics project. It has no mechanism for dynamic autodiscovery of infrastructure targets, and it is not designed to ingest or display the high volume of short-lived monitor results that infrastructure monitoring typically produces.

For infrastructure or Kubernetes uptime monitoring, use one of the following approaches instead:

• Heartbeat with autodiscovery: Run Heartbeat on your infrastructure and use autodiscovery to dynamically monitor hosts and pods. Results appear in the Uptime app.
• Elastic Agent with the Uptime Monitors integration: Deploy a standalone Elastic Agent and configure the Uptime Monitors (Heartbeat) integration to collect availability data from your infrastructure. The Uptime app is deprecated as of 8.15 and is not available in Serverless.

When you manage larger numbers of synthetic monitors, use tags to keep them organized. Many of the views in the Synthetics UI are tag-aware and can group data by tag.

If the Synthetics app doesn't include a UI for your exact needs, you can use dashboards to build custom visualizations. For a complete list of fields used by the Synthetics UI, refer to Heartbeat's exported fields.