Installation

Synthetic Monitoring is a Grafana app plugin that can be installed in your Grafana Cloud or 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 Grafana Cloud

1. Navigate to the plugin page.
2. Click the Installation tab.
3. Choose an organization if you have more than one.
4. Click Install Plugin.

Install on local Grafana

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 instance:

1. Navigate to Configuration > Plugins
2. Select Synthetic Monitoring from the list.
3. Click Enable to start the initialization process.
4. Enter your admin API Key.
5. Select a materics and logs instance for data to be written to.
6. 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.