---
title: "I want to know if a site is up | Grafana Labs"
description: "Create a Synthetic Monitoring ping check and open its dashboard"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

Section 2 · Choose a starting point

Create a Synthetic Monitoring ping check and open its dashboard

Estimated time: 2 min

## I want to know if a site is up

Suppose you want to know whether a site or API is reachable, and you’d rather hear about an outage from your monitoring than from your users. That’s when you use **Synthetic Monitoring**, which runs continuous checks from locations around the world, called **probes**.

Here’s what this option does:

- Supports several kinds of check. The simplest is a **ping check**, which sends a network packet to the target and waits for a response
- Runs checks from probes operated by Grafana Labs, so nothing gets installed or runs on your machine
- Gives you a dashboard for each check, so you can watch results as they arrive

## Considerations

- **A view from outside**: Probes check your target from around the world, catching availability and performance issues your own network might not show.
- **It keeps running**: Checking continues after you close the browser, and it doesn’t stop until you disable or delete the check.
- **Not a load test**: These checks ask whether the target is up. To see how an endpoint behaves under load, refer to [**I want to load-test an endpoint**](/docs/learning-hub/get-started-grafana-cloud/02-what-do-you-have/08-load-test/).

## Before you start

- A Grafana Cloud account: [sign up free](/signup/cloud/connect-account) if you don’t have one
- The **Editor** or **Admin** role in your Grafana Cloud stack to create checks
- The **Admin** role if Synthetic Monitoring isn’t set up in your stack yet. Setting it up the first time needs an administrator.

## Try it yourself

The guide below runs in your own Grafana Cloud stack. You set up Synthetic Monitoring if your stack doesn’t have it yet, create a ping check, and open the check’s dashboard to watch results come in.

#### Create your first uptime check

Complete this interactive guide directly in your Grafana Cloud stack with an interactive learning experience.

[Open in Grafana Cloud]()