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

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 whitelisting.

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

There are two options for alerting on Synthetic Monitoring: standard Grafana alerting or by using Prometheus-style alerting rules.

See the Grafana Cloud Alerting page for more information.

Next steps

See the Installation Guide to install Synthetic Monitoring in your Grafana instance.