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.

Before you start

• A Grafana Cloud account: sign up free 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.