The difference is not always so obvious.
A Real User Monitoring tool, track and monitor the behavior of real users who browse your portal, ignoring what the boundary conditions (local connectivity, hardware configuration of the visitor, etc.); the Synthetic Monitoring, instead born with the characteristic to compare a set of detections from heterogeneous configurations. A real performance benchmarks of your service. Moreover, it can be instantiated to repeat actions over time with fixed deadlines, allowing you to compare the performance gap in different application scenarios.
The solution for web services
ARES, the platform name which stands for “Availability and Response Time of Enterprise Services” is the Synthetic Monitoring tool developed by CriticalCase that allows you to preserve your business continuity on the web, providing a set of information easier to interpret and to compare with user feedback and the Real User Monitoring tools in use.