Troubleshooting Synthetics

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

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

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.

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.

When creating a Private Location, you have to:

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.

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.

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:

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:

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:

When using Elastic Cloud, if there are no options available in the Locations dropdown when you try to create a monitor in the Synthetics app or if no locations are listed when using the location command, it might be because you do not have permission to use Elastic managed locations and there are no Private Locations available yet.

There are a few ways to fix this:

If you try to create or edit a monitor hosted on Elastic’s global managed infrastructure but see a note that you do not have permission to use Elastic managed locations, an administrator has restricted the use of public locations.

To fix this you can either:

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