Grafana Cloud Monitor public endpoints Checks

Checks

Synthetic Monitoring checks are tests that run on selected probes at defined intervals and report metrics and logs back to your Grafana Cloud account. The target for checks can be a domain name, a server, or a website, depending on what information you would like to gather about your endpoint. You can define multiple checks for a single endpoint to check different capabilities.

Supported checks

Below is some basic information about each type of check supported by Synthetic Monitoring. When creating checks, click Options to see advanced settings for each type.

Ping

Ping is the simplest check to test that an endpoint is available. Target servers must be reachable from the probe’s network and be configured to reply to ICMP echo requests. The time for the endpoint to respond is used to measure latency from each probe location.

HTTP and HTTPS

HTTP and HTTPS checks are used to test websites. Uptime and response latency are measured like other check types. These checks can also be configured for more advanced tests like if a site is using a specific version of SSL, for SSL certificate expiration, or if HTTP automatically redirects to HTTPS.

DNS

DNS or domain name servers resolve a domain such as grafana.com to an IP address. This check ensures a domain resolves and measures the average time for the resolution to happen. DNS checks can be set up to validate against a specific DNS server and check for a specific kind of response.

TCP

A TCP check connects to an endpoint on a given hostname or IP address and a port. This ensures a server accepts the connection and measures response latency and uptime.

Traceroute

A Traceroute check runs traceroute from probes to targets. You can trace the path of a request through the Internet, and get more detailed information about how your requests are flowing through the public internet.

Traceroute check can be useful to Visualize network path, see how that path is changing over time, and how it’s reaching the destination.

See our introduction blogpost for more details

Check Metrics

See the Check Metrics page for more details.

Next steps

See the page on setting up Private probes to test servers not reachable from public networks or test from different locations than are currently available.