Did you know the green IT services market is on track to triple in value, from around $31 billion in 2025 to over $100 billion by 2032? That’s not just impressive; it’s a wake-up call.

As more organizations double down on sustainability, on this Earth Day, data centers (those power-hungry digital workhorses) are under the spotlight. So the big question is: How do we keep performance high and power consumption low?

That’s where synthetic monitoring steps in. And trust us, it’s more exciting (and impactful) than it sounds.

What Is Synthetic Monitoring and Why Should You Care?

Synthetic monitoring is like sending digital “test users” to interact with your apps or websites 24/7. It runs simulated transactions (like logins, checkouts, form submissions, etc.) to proactively test performance and availability.

Why Is It a Game-Changer?

• Synthetic monitoring lets you anticipate trouble before users even notice something’s off. You’re not waiting for a red flag, you’re already fixing things.
• It also gives you a front-row seat to how your systems perform in different regions, on different devices, at all hours of the day. 
• And if something starts to slip, you get a heads-up instantly, not after your support inbox explodes.

Originally, synthetic monitoring was all about keeping tabs on things like uptime, load speeds and user experience, but today, it’s stepping up to do more. It is helping us rethink how we manage energy and efficiency in IT operations.

The Energy Challenge in Data Centers

In 2024, data centers consumed more than 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, which is about 1.5% of all the electricity used on the planet (International Energy Agency). But, where’s all that energy going?

A huge chunk of it gets eaten up by hardware running at full tilt, cooling systems working overtime, and — believe it or not — servers just sitting around doing nothing. Yep, idle resources still pull power, and it adds up fast.

To understand (and fix) the problem, we need to keep an eye on metrics like:

• PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness): How efficiently power is being used overall.
• Server Utilization: Are your machines actually working or just burning energy?
• Cooling Efficiency: How much energy is going into keeping things cool, and is it worth it?

Bridging the Gap: Synthetic Monitoring Meets Green IT

Here’s where things get exciting. Synthetic monitoring is also a powerful lens into your energy footprint. It can flag underutilized servers that are quietly guzzling power in the background by simulating user behavior.

Additionally, you can correlate those performance tests with real-time energy data to see what’s draining resources. It also helps you catch sloppy application behavior, like processes that keep running long after they’re needed.

And with synthetic load testing, you can stress-test your systems under different usage patterns to predict how much energy they’ll need—before you scale up. Smart, right?

Use Cases and Real-World Applications

Synthetic monitoring is quietly becoming a game-changer in the push for greener IT. Across industries, teams are finding clever ways to pair synthetic insights with energy goals. Let’s look at how this plays out in practice:

1. Reducing Idle Capacity with Synthetic Traffic Modeling

Consider a global e-commerce platform that sees heavy spikes during sales, but has downtime the rest of the month. Their IT team was able to simulate consistent activity across regions and identify pockets of idle server capacity by using synthetic traffic modeling.

The result? They consolidated workloads and shut down underused instances, cutting energy waste without compromising availability.

2. Spotting Inefficient Workload Scheduling

A growing software as a service (SaaS) company struggled with unpredictable energy usage. When they added synthetic monitoring to their workload scheduler, they discovered high-energy tasks running during periods of low demand.

Once they rescheduled these jobs to better align with real user activity, energy consumption dropped and app performance improved.

3. Integrating with Green IT Systems and SLAs

More organizations are now pairing synthetic monitoring with energy-aware orchestration tools, thereby, enabling automation resource allocation based on performance and energy impact. 

This shift is further influencing freen SLAs (Service Level Agreements), where sustainability benchmarks now accompany uptime guarantees. 

Tools and Technologies Powering Green Synthetic Monitoring

When it comes to running greener data centers, mindset matters and so does your tech stack. The good news? There’s a growing ecosystem of tools that brings energy efficiency into the heart of synthetic monitoring. Here are some tools making real impact:

• Middleware, Datadog, New Relic: These major observability platforms now support features to correlate synthetic monitoring with energy usage metrics. They help teams optimize both performance and power consumption.
• AI and ML-Powered analytics: Machine learning models can forecast energy demand based on traffic patterns, app behavior and historical trends, thus helping with smarter and predictive scaling decisions.
• Open Source tools like Prometheus + Grafana: Popular combo for customizable monitoring dashboards which is now expandable with energy metrics. 
• Kepler (Kubernetes-Based Efficient Power Level Exporter): Helps track energy consumption at the container level in cloud-native environments. 

Best Practices for Implementing Synthetic Monitoring

Getting started with synthetic monitoring for greener IT? A few smart practices can make all the difference:

1. Start With a Green Baseline: Measure current energy usage and system performance before making changes. Because you can’t optimize what you don’t track.
2. Blend Synthetic and Real-User Monitoring: Synthetic tests tell you what should happen; real-user data shows what is happening. Together, they give a fuller picture of performance and energy impact.
3. Get Everyone on Board: Sustainability is not just an IT issue. Bring DevOps, infrastructure and sustainability teams into the conversation early for better alignment.
4. Embrace Continuous Improvement: Use feedback loops to regularly tweak synthetic scenarios, flag new inefficiencies and refine energy-saving strategies over time.
5. Automate for Consistency: Set up automated alerts and scripts to catch anomalies and spin down idle resources, ensuring nothing gets overlooked in the day-to-day hustle.

Future Outlook of Sustainable IT 

Looking ahead, observability is set to play a huge role in shaping sustainable IT. As companies get more serious about sustainability, the tools we use to track performance will start focusing more on energy use and environmental impact. 

We’re also likely to see new regulations and green compliance standards coming into play, which will push businesses to be more transparent about their energy consumption.

And as sustainability becomes more integrated into everyday business, we’ll see observability platforms working hand-in-hand with carbon accounting tools to make tracking and reporting much smoother, and ultimately, more effective.

The Bottom Line 

Synthetic monitoring is a key tool for making data centers more energy-efficient. It helps identify underutilized resources and optimize energy usage, thus creating a balance between performance, reliability and sustainability.

The demand for greener IT is growing rapidly. For tech leaders, the message is clear: Focus on green observability and make smarter choices to create a more sustainable future for your business and the planet.

Catch issues before they impact your customers with synthetic monitoring. Simulate your entire application globally and fix problems early. With support for multiple protocols, you’ll keep your systems running smoothly, no matter the challenge.