Synthetic Transactions

What are Synthetic Transactions?

Synthetic transactions are scripted operations that simulate user interactions with applications.

They help monitor performance, availability, and functionality without real user involvement.

Analyzing Synthetic Transactions

Monitoring Performance

Synthetic transactions are crucial for assessing application performance. By simulating user interactions, they provide valuable insights into how applications perform under various conditions. This proactive approach helps identify potential issues before real users are affected.

Moreover, synthetic transactions allow organizations to establish baseline performance metrics. Consistent monitoring against these baselines aids in detecting anomalies and understanding performance trends over time, ensuring optimal application functionality. For instance, organizations can use a fraud score to assess risk levels in transactions.

Ensuring Availability

Ensuring application availability is critical for user satisfaction. Synthetic transactions help verify that applications are accessible and functioning correctly at all times. This continuous monitoring reduces the risk of unexpected downtime.

By simulating user activities, organizations can test application availability across different regions and devices. This comprehensive analysis helps identify and rectify accessibility issues, enhancing user experience and maintaining service reliability. Protecting personal information is especially important in ensuring user trust.

Validating Functionality

Synthetic transactions play a vital role in validating application functionality. They allow organizations to test various features and workflows, ensuring that each component operates as intended. This validation is crucial for maintaining application quality.

Furthermore, synthetic transactions facilitate regression testing. By repeatedly simulating user interactions, they help verify that new updates or changes do not introduce bugs, preserving application integrity and user satisfaction.

Proactive Issue Resolution

Synthetic transactions empower organizations to proactively address potential issues. By identifying performance bottlenecks and functionality gaps early, they enable timely interventions, minimizing user impact and maintaining service excellence.

Additionally, these transactions support trend analysis and forecasting. By understanding historical performance data, organizations can anticipate future challenges and strategically plan maintenance or upgrades, ensuring long-term application stability.

Use Cases of Synthetic Transactions

Monitoring Payment Gateways

• Synthetic transactions can simulate real payment processes to ensure gateways are functioning correctly.

• Compliance officers use these simulations to detect and prevent potential fraud by identifying anomalies in transaction patterns.

Testing Fraud Detection Systems

• Analysts deploy synthetic transactions to test the efficacy of fraud detection algorithms.

• This helps in fine-tuning systems to better identify suspicious activities without impacting real customers, ensuring robust fraud prevention measures.

Validating Security Protocols

• By executing synthetic transactions, security teams can assess the effectiveness of encryption and authentication protocols.

• Compliance officers can then identify vulnerabilities and ensure that security standards are upheld to protect customer data.

Ensuring Regulatory Compliance

• Synthetic transactions can be used to verify that financial systems adhere to regulatory requirements.

• Compliance officers can simulate scenarios to ensure that all transactions meet legal standards, thereby mitigating risks of non-compliance penalties.

Recent Statistics on Synthetic Transactions

• Synthetic identity fraud, which often involves synthetic transactions, now accounts for about 30% of all identity fraud cases as of 2025. This marks a significant increase in the use of synthetic data and identities in fraudulent activities, reflecting the growing sophistication and prevalence of these schemes. Learn more about synthetic identity fraud trends. Source

• The synthetic data generation market, which includes the creation of synthetic transaction data for use in industries like banking and finance, is projected to grow from $315 million in 2024 to $6,574.9 million by 2032, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46.2%. This rapid growth highlights the increasing adoption of synthetic transactions for purposes such as fraud detection, stress-testing, and AI model training. Source

How FraudNet Can Help with Synthetic Transactions

FraudNet's advanced AI-powered solutions are expertly designed to detect and mitigate synthetic transactions, a growing threat in the digital landscape. By leveraging machine learning, anomaly detection, and global fraud intelligence, FraudNet provides businesses with precise and reliable tools to identify and prevent fraudulent activities involving synthetic identities. This empowers enterprises to protect their operations, ensure compliance, and maintain trust while focusing on growth. Request a demo to explore FraudNet's fraud detection and risk management solutions.

FAQ: Understanding Synthetic Transactions

1. What are synthetic transactions? Synthetic transactions are simulated user interactions with a system or application designed to test its performance, availability, and functionality.

2. How do synthetic transactions differ from real user monitoring? Unlike real user monitoring, which analyzes actual user interactions, synthetic transactions are pre-scripted and executed automatically to predict potential issues before they affect real users.

3. Why are synthetic transactions important? They help identify performance bottlenecks, ensure system reliability, and verify that critical functions are working as expected, even during off-peak hours or before new releases.

4. What tools are commonly used for synthetic transactions? Tools like Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic are popular for setting up and analyzing synthetic transactions.

5. Can synthetic transactions be used for security testing? While primarily used for performance testing, synthetic transactions can also help identify security vulnerabilities by simulating various user scenarios. This is especially useful in detecting false identity fraud and other malicious activities.

6. How often should synthetic transactions be run? The frequency depends on the business needs and system requirements but is typically set to run at regular intervals, such as every few minutes or hours.

7. What are the limitations of synthetic transactions? They may not capture all real-world user behaviors and can miss issues that occur under specific conditions or with unique user interactions.

8. How do synthetic transactions support DevOps practices? By providing continuous feedback on system performance, synthetic transactions help teams quickly identify and resolve issues, supporting a culture of continuous improvement and rapid deployment.