If you experience issues setting up or configuring Datadog Synthetics, use this information to begin troubleshooting. If you continue to have trouble, contact our AWESOME support team.
Sometimes you know you have a working endpoint because when you visit your website in a browser (or cURL it), you get 2xx status code. But when setting an API test on this endpoints or when hitting Test URL to perform a fast test you get 5xx or 4xx status code.
This happens because cURL automatically sets a user-agent as a request header (as your browser), but Datadog API tests don’t automatically set one.
This can be a problem because some websites ban requests that don’t have a user-agent set, which causes Datadog API tests to return a 5xx or 4xx status code.
The solution to this problem is to manually set a user-agent in your API tests. Set the user-agent in your API test under Make a request > Advanced Options > Header > Request Header. Set the Name to user-agent and set the Value to any valid user-agent value like Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9 which represents a Mac OS X-based computer using a Safari browser.
When creating Synthetics tests, you might get 403 Forbidden errors at first. It’s coming from the Sec-Datadog: Request sent by a Datadog Synthetics Browser Test (https://docs.datadoghq.com/synthetics/) - test_id: <TEST_ID> header that is automatically being sent by Datadog.
Make sure this header is not blacklisted by your servers in order to remove this error.
Additionally, you might also have to whitelist Datadog Synthetics IP ranges to make sure Datadog servers are allowed to send requests to your infrastructure.
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
