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Grafana Cloud Monitor public endpoints
Grafana Cloud

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 Checks 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 IPs for allow-listing.

Refer to the Probes page 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 the Private Probes page for more details.

Alerting

By default, Synthetic Monitoring alerting uses Grafana Alerting.

Refer to the Synthetic Monitoring alerting page for more details.

Config as Code

The Grafana Terraform provider has support for managing Synthetic Monitoring checks and probes. If you already have checks or probes created via the UI, you can export an initial Terraform configuration from the Config tab of the Synthetic monitoring plugin.

Note

You need a synthetic monitoring access token to manage resources using the Grafana Terraform provider. You can get a token by navigating to the Config tab of the Synthetic monitoring plugin or via the API.

We also have support for Synthetic Monitoring in grizzly

Alternatively, The Synthetic Monitoring API is available for those who don’t want to use Terraform but still want to manage their Synthetic Monitoring checks programmatically.

Billing and usage

Synthetic monitoring usage is billed the same way metrics and logs are billed. For more information, refer to Understand your invoice

Next steps

Refer to Installation and initialization of Synthetic Monitoring for setup and installation.

Refer to Get started to get up and running with Synthetic Monitoring.