Description:
Currently, Zabbix Synthetic Monitoring provides active checks for Web Applications & APIs, allowing us to measure availability and response times. However, there is no standardized way to evaluate user experience based on these metrics.

We propose adding APDEX (Application Performance Index) support to Synthetic Monitoring. APDEX is an industry-standard metric that measures user satisfaction with application performance based on response times.

Key Features:

• Define target response time (T) and tolerance (4T) per service or check.
• Classify synthetic monitoring results as:
  • Satisfied: response ≤ T
  • Tolerating: T < response ≤ 4T
  • Frustrated: response > 4T
• Calculate APDEX score using the formula:
  APDEX = (Satisfied + Tolerating/2) / Total Samples
• Possible visualization options:
  • APDEX score per service in dashboards.
  • Trend charts for APDEX over time.
  • Distribution of satisfied/tolerating/frustrated responses.
• Add triggers for APDEX thresholds (e.g., alert if APDEX < 0.85).

Additional Considerations:

• Zabbix & OpenTelemetry Integration:
  Align APDEX implementation using OpenTelemetry data. This will allow Zabbix to export APDEX-related data to external platforms and correlate synthetic monitoring with distributed tracing.

Users/ Customers Benefits:

• Align Zabbix Synthetic Monitoring with industry best practices.
• Provide a clear, user-centric performance metric.
• Enable proactive alerting based on user experience, not just raw response times.
• Improve interoperability with modern observability ecosystems.

References:

• https://www.apdex.org/