Monitor public endpoints using Grafana Synthetic Monitoring

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 define checks to continually test remote targets from probe locations around the world and assess the availability, performance, and correctness of services. As each check runs, metrics and logs are collected and published to Prometheus and Loki instances in your account.

Supported checks

The following types of checks are supported:

Ping endpoints that support ICMP
HTTP and HTTPS websites
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.

Config 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.