Introduction

Synthetic Monitoring is a black box monitoring solution provided as part of Grafana Cloud. Synthetic Monitoring gives you insight into how your applications and services are behaving from an external point of view.

You can use Synthetic Monitoring to:

Assess availability, performance, and correctness: Ensure that your services are available, and are also performing well and returning the correct information to your users to guarantee a great user experience.
Troubleshoot issues with metrics and logs: Find the root cause of problems with endpoints you’re monitoring by exploring metrics and logs collected during each check run. Prometheus metrics and Logs from checks are published directly to your Grafana Cloud account.
Use blackbox monitoring: Because Synthetic Monitoring is built on top of Prometheus blackbox exporter, you can configure checks through the UI in Grafana or via the API.
Alert the right people at the right time: Use Synthetic Monitoring to leverage Prometheus-style alerting to ensure if a check fails, alerts are making their way to the right people through the right notification method.

Supported check types

Synthetic Monitoring supports the following check types:

Ping endpoints that support ICMP
HTTP and HTTPS requests
k6 scripted checks that run a k6 test
k6 browser checks to run k6 tests using a headless browser
Multiple HTTP/S requests
DNS to test domain name resolution
TCP connection checks
Traceroute check for running traceroute from probes to targets

TLS is supported where applicable.

Refer to Check types for more details.

Probes

In Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring, probes are the agents responsible for emulating user interactions and collecting data from your specified targets across different global locations. Their data provides valuable insights into the health and performance of your services, helping you ensure optimal user experience and quickly identify and troubleshoot potential issues.

Each probe sends metrics and logs to the Synthetic Monitoring backend, including such information as target availability and health and response latencies, which are then rendered in the Synthetic Monitoring dashboard.

Public probes

Public probes are instances of the open source Synthetic Monitoring Agent operated by Grafana Labs at distributed locations around the world. Checks run from configured locations and write results directly to your Grafana Cloud account.

If you need to allow access through your firewall, refer to source IP addresses for allow-listing.

Refer to Public probes for more details.

Private probes

You can also install private probes and run checks from your environment or any other locations you choose.

Refer to Set up private probes for more details.

Alerting

By default, Synthetic Monitoring alerting uses Grafana Alerting.

Refer to Synthetic Monitoring alerting for more details.

Configuration as Code

You can manage synthetic monitoring resources such as checks and probes through the UI. To integrate synthetic monitoring with your existing DevOps workflows, you can also manage these resources as code via Terraform and Grizzly, and programmatically using the API.

For instructions and more details, refer to Provision via Code and API.