Rank by revenue
Monitor the flows that generate revenue or are covered by SLAs first. Treat sign-up, checkout, auth, and notifications as mandatory, even if you have to pause lower-value checks.
Defer non-critical synthetics to off-peak intervals, but still keep a tiny heartbeat so you notice total failure. Rebalance intervals whenever pricing, seasonality, or SLAs change.
Tag each monitor with owner and blast radius so you know what can be safely skipped if quotas tighten.
Share components
Reuse scripts across regions to save quotas and keep behavior consistent. Parameterize endpoints, credentials, and locale rather than duplicating code.
Rotate test data to avoid account throttles. If the flow needs payments or OTP, build a test harness that can mint fresh tokens per run.
Favor multi-step synthetics that exercise the full journey once instead of many single-point checks that each consume quotas.
Budget tips
- Use multi-step scripts with assertion screenshots for faster triage
- Stagger intervals by region so spikes don't align
- Reuse credentials safely with secrets vaulting and rotation
Review quarterly
Retire checks that never catch issues and add ones aligned to new launches or major dependencies. Every monitor should have a hypothesis of what it will catch.
Keep a backlog of candidate monitors with owners. When you free budget, you already know which journeys are next in line.
Track which synthetics actually detected incidents versus ones that only created noise. Tune intervals and assertions based on that history.
Design for investigation speed
Capture request/response samples, screenshots, and timing breakdowns. That evidence lets on-call decide if the issue is network, dependency, or application without rerunning tests.
Correlate synthetics with real user monitoring. If RUM shows pain that synthetics miss, add a new scripted scenario instead of simply shortening intervals.