What is the function of synthetic monitoring in Datadog?

Synthetic monitoring in Datadog is primarily designed to proactively test application responsiveness and uptime. This function allows users to simulate user interactions with their applications, thereby ensuring that the application performs as expected under various scenarios. By mimicking real user behavior, synthetic monitoring helps identify issues such as slow response times or downtime before they impact actual users. This capability is crucial for maintaining a high-quality user experience and ensuring reliability across applications.

The other options, while important aspects of application performance management, do not directly relate to the specific function of synthetic monitoring. Analyzing backend performance typically involves monitoring server metrics and application performance data, while securely storing logs is associated with log management rather than proactive testing. Lastly, optimizing frontend code is a development process aimed at enhancing performance but does not encompass the monitoring aspect provided by synthetic testing.