# Elastic Synthetics vs heartbeat

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-synthetics-vs-heartbeat/281660
**Category:** Kibana
**Created:** [August 17, 2021, 9:57am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-synthetics-vs-heartbeat/281660 "2021-08-17T09:57:52Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Robin020](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/71c47a/32.png) [@Robin020](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Robin020)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2021, 9:57am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-synthetics-vs-heartbeat/281660/1 "2021-08-17T09:57:52Z")

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Hello,

Could somebody tell me what the differents are between Elastic Synthetics and Heartbeat?  
It looks the same for me.

Regards,  
Robin

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### Author: ![Wolfram\_Haussig](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/wolfram_haussig/32/70528_2.png) [@Wolfram\_Haussig](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Wolfram_Haussig)
#### Post date: [August 19, 2021, 7:19am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-synthetics-vs-heartbeat/281660/2 "2021-08-19T07:19:38Z")

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Hello Robin,

Although heartbeat is also running the synthetic tests(see [here](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/observability/7.x/synthetics-quickstart.html#synthetics-quickstart-step-two)) synthetic tests are much more powerful when having a web application but does not make sense for other usecases like REST webservices(hopefully this will change in the future):

In our usecase - before synthetics tests - we had a monitor for each of our web applications. The monitor called the startpage using HTTPS and required that the server responded with a HTTP200 (OK). This worked but it has caused false positives because the webserver was up and running and so was the webApp but the login failed because the database in the background was not available.

With synthetics - which uses browser automation - we created a multi-step workflow to call the startpage, login into the application using username/password and execute some functions. This way, the monitors can guarantee that our application is up and running....

Was this description helpful for you?

Best regards  
Wolfram

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### Author: ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2021, 7:20am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-synthetics-vs-heartbeat/281660/3 "2021-09-16T07:20:34Z")

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