Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring powered by k6

We’re excited to announce a big update to our Synthetic Monitoring product!

Until now, Synthetic Monitoring has used the Prometheus blackbox exporter to test at the protocol level: HTTP, DNS, TCP, gRPC, and ICMP (for ping and traceroute). This worked well for health and uptime monitoring, but it didn’t cover the full range of synthetic monitoring use cases. With modern applications, it’s important to test not only single endpoints but also complex transactions and critical user journeys.

Today we’re launching a revamped Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring, which integrates k6 OSS as part of the engine. This unlocks two new check types to expand your test coverage and increase confidence in your applications:

MultiHTTP checks (generally available): A form-based approach for defining multi-step tests. Under the hood, the form generates a k6 script, so you don’t have to write code.
k6 Scripted checks (public preview): Gives you the power and flexibility to define your workflow tests in JavaScript, using the k6 API to efficiently author tests.

With both new check types, you chain steps together to simulate a workflow, passing data from one step to the next. Like all other checks, you can set up Prometheus-style alerts to track SLOs and notify your team of any problems. You can also leverage the built-in dashboards to visualize results, analyze trends, and quickly resolve performance issues.

To learn more about the new check types, refer to the Check types documentation, announcement blog post, and the following video demo: