IMPORTANT: No additional bug fixes or documentation updates will be released for this version. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.
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Elastic Docs ›Elastic Observability [8.9] ›Synthetic monitoring

Troubleshooting Synthetics

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Troubleshooting Synthetics

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Local debugging

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For debugging synthetic tests locally, you can set an environment variable, DEBUG=synthetics, to capture Synthetics agent logs when using the Synthetics CLI.

Common issues

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Monitors stopped running after upgrading to 8.8.0 or above

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Synthetic monitors will stop running if you have gone through this workflow:

  1. Enabled Monitor Management (in the Uptime app) prior to 8.6.0.
  2. Created a synthetic monitor that is configured to run on Elastic’s global managed infrastructure.
  3. Upgraded to 8.8.0 or above.

This happens because the permissions granted by clicking Enable Monitor Management in versions prior to 8.6.0 are not sufficient in versions 8.8.0 and above.

To fix this, a user with admin permissions needs to visit the Synthetics app in Kibana. In 8.8.0 and above, the equivalent of "enabling monitor management" happens automatically in the background when a user with admin permissions visits the Synthetics app.

If a user without admin permissions visits the Synthetics app before an admin has visited it, the user will see a note that says "Only administrators can enable this feature". That note will persist until an admin user visits the Synthetics app.

No results from a monitor configured to run on a Private Location

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If you have created a Private Location and configured a monitor to run on that Private Location, but don’t see any results for that monitor in the Synthetics app, make sure there is an agent configured to run against the agent policy.

If you attempt to assign an agent policy to a Private Location before configuring an agent to run against the agent policy, you will see a note in the Synthetics app UI that the selected agent policy has no agents.

When creating a Private Location, you have to:

  1. Set up Fleet Server and Elastic Agent.
  2. Connect Fleet to the Elastic Stack and enroll an Elastic Agent in Fleet.
  3. Add a Private Location in the Synthetics app.

If you do not complete the second item, no agents will be configured to run against the agent policy, and any monitors configured to run on that Private Location won’t be able to run so there will be no results in the Synthetics app.

To fix this, make sure there is an agent configured to run against the agent policy.

No results from a monitor

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If you have configured a monitor but don’t see any results for that monitor in the Synthetics app, whether running them from Elastic’s global managed testing infrastructure or from Private Locations, ensure Synthetics has a direct connection to Elasticsearch.

Do not configure any ingest pipelines or output via Logstash as this will prevent Synthetics from working properly and is not supported.

Browser monitor configured to run on a Private Location not running to schedule

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If you have browser monitors configured to run on a Private Location but notice one or more of them are not running as scheduled, this could be because:

  • The time it takes for your monitor to run is longer than the frequency you have set
  • There may be too many monitors trying to run concurrently, causing some of them to skip their scheduled run

You may also see a message in the logs such as 2 tasks have missed their schedule deadlines by more than 1 second in the last 15s. These will be visible from inside the Agent diagnostic ZIP file, and the numbers and time periods may be different in your logs.

Start by identifying the cause of the issue. First, check if the time it takes the monitor to run is less than the scheduled frequency:

  1. Go to the Synthetics app.
  2. Click the monitor, then click Go to monitor.
  3. Go to the Overview tab to see the Avg. duration. You can also view the duration for individual runs in the History tab.

  4. Compare the duration to the scheduled frequency. If the duration is greater than the scheduled frequency, for example if the monitor that takes 90 seconds to run and its scheduled frequency is 1 minute, the next scheduled run will not occur because the current one is still running so you may see results for every other scheduled run.

    To fix this, you can either:

    • Change the frequency so the monitor runs less often.
    • Refactor the monitor so it can run in a shorter amount of time.

If the duration is less than the scheduled frequency or the suggestion above does not fix the issue, then there may be too many browser monitors attempting to run on the Private Location. Due to the additional hardware overhead of running browser monitors, we limit each Private Location to only run two browser monitors at the same time. Depending on how many browser monitors you have configured to run on the Private Location and their schedule, the Private Location may not be able to run them all because it would require more than two browser tests to be running simultaneously.

To fix this issue, you can either:

  • Increase the number of concurrent browser monitors allowed (as described in Scaling Private Locations), paying attention to the scaling and hardware requirements documented).
  • Create multiple Private Locations and spread your browser monitors across them more evenly (effectively horizontally scaling your Private Locations).

Get help

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Elastic Support

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Discussion forum

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For other questions and feature requests, visit our discussion forum.

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