Abstract: Techniques for processing web probes for monitoring user experience including use of caching to prevent a surge of web probes on destination servers and for detecting web probe traffic. A method implemented by a connector includes intercepting a Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) web probe request to a server, identifying a cache hit associated with the request in a cache, generating a synthetic Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) response based on information from the identified cache hit, wherein the generated synthetic HTTP response includes an extension header containing collected statistics, and sending the synthetic HTTP response. The method can further include simulating a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) handshake to estimate SSL cost.