Private synthetic location running on Windows 10

[kalle_lahtinen]

Hi,

I would imagine that most of us who've deployed synthetic monitoring locations on customer premises (like a customer office network) have found that the easiest option is to use a standard customer laptop running Windows. You get antivirus updates etc. to the laptop via the same channels that "real users" do, and then you're able to measure the accurate performance from the network perspective, by residing in the same subnet with the end-users.

However, Dynatrace ActiveGate for private synthetic monitoring only supports Windows Server 2016 and 2019. There is a comment:

Unsupported Windows versions for testing purposes only

If you only want to test private synthetic on a non-production machine, for example your own desktop, you can install synthetic-enabled ActiveGates on unsupported Windows versions, such as Windows 10 or Windows Server 2012.

So it appears that at least the installation won't fail on Windows 10. But it's not officially supported either. What sort of problems should I expect, if I'm running synthetic monitoring from a Windows 10 host? Other than the lack of support, of course. I think that's manageable, but does anyone have any hands-on experience about this?

[HannahM]

I use a Synthetic AG on a Windows 10 machine for my local testing. I only run a handful of monitors from it and I have never had any issues. I would not use it for large numbers of monitors though.

[MateuszKulewicz · Accepted solution]

Hi Kalle!

While this is technically possible, if this host has any other traffic you might experience varying metrics from run to run. Please also mind that some AV software tends to interfere with the browsers we're running in the background to run the synthetic monitors.

Aside from that there should be no blocking issues if you just need to monitor whether the pages you're reaching are accessible and your host fills the minimum system requirements. I'd probably not use my own laptop for monitoring production systems as I wouldn't know if an outage is caused by other software I'm running or is something your other users are actually experiencing.

[kalle_lahtinen]

Thanks Mateusz & Hannah! Sounds like this in general should work, then. And when you think about it, the setup isn't that far from how things used to work with Enterprise Synthetic agents, which quite often were hosted on regular laptops. The laptop will of course be fully dedicated to monitoring, with no other usage.