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.

See the Checks page for more details.

Public probes

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

If you need to allow access through your firewall, see source IPs for allow-listing.

See the Probes page for more details.

Private probes

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

See the Private Probes page for more details.

Alerting

By default, Synthetic Monitoring alerting uses Grafana Cloud Alerting.

See 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 and/or probes created via the UI, an initial Terraform configuration can be exported from the Config tab of the Synthetic monitoring plugin.

NOTE: You need to get a synthetic monitoring access token in order to use the Grafana Terraform provider to manage resources. That can either be done 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.

Next steps

See Installation and initialization of Synthetic Monitoring for setup and installation.

See Getting started to get up and running with Synthetic Monitoring.