Installation and initialization of Synthetic Monitoring
Synthetic Monitoring is a Grafana app plugin that is included in your Grafana Cloud or can be installed in your local Grafana instance. You will still need a Grafana Cloud account if you install in a local Grafana instance.
Prerequisites
Before getting started, make sure you have the following from your Grafana Cloud account:
- A running metrics instance with a Prometheus backend type
- A running logging instance
- An admin API Key
The admin API Key is required for initialization of Synthetic Monitoring, but will not be stored. We recommend that you delete this key once initialization is completed.
Install on local Grafana (skip this section if using Grafana Cloud)
NOTE: Please note that if you choose to connect an on-premise open-source (OSS) Grafana instance to your Grafana Cloud services, our support team can help with issues on the Grafana Cloud side but will be unable to assist in troubleshooting issues that arise within your on-premise Grafana installation. Support for doing this is limited to documentation and the community forums. See Account types and support available for Grafana Cloud users for more information.
Use the grafana-cli tool to install Synthetic Monitoring from the command-line:
grafana-cli plugins install grafana-synthetic-monitoring-app
The CLI installs the plugin in your Grafana plugins directory. The default location is /var/lib/grafana/plugins.
Configuration
To enable and initialize Synthetic Monitoring within your Grafana Cloud or Grafana instance:
- Navigate to Configuration > Plugins
- Select Synthetic Monitoring from the list.
- Click Enable to start the initialization process.
- (Grafana Cloud only) Enter your admin API Key. (Grafana local only) Use provisioning files as described in GitHub.
- Select a metrics and logs instance for data to be written to.
- Click Setup
Once Synthetic Monitoring is installed, you can delete the admin API key.
Next steps
Refer to the Getting started page to create your first check.
