The value of Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic Monitoring is a blackbox monitoring solution that tests your services from an external perspective, giving you insight into how your applications and services behave from the user’s point of view. Unlike internal monitoring that observes systems from within your infrastructure, Synthetic Monitoring emulates user behavior from global probe locations, detecting issues before users report them.

Traditional monitoring approaches often miss problems that only manifest externally. A service might appear healthy from within your data center while being unreachable to users due to DNS issues, network routing problems, or CDN failures. Synthetic Monitoring fills this gap by continuously verifying that your services are available, performing well, and returning correct responses.

Synthetic Monitoring provides the following advantages over traditional internal monitoring:

• Detect outages before users are impacted: Proactively identify availability issues from multiple global locations before they affect real users.
• Verify external accessibility: Confirm that services are reachable from outside your infrastructure, catching DNS, routing, and CDN issues.
• Measure real-world latency: Understand actual response times from different geographic regions, not just internal network performance.
• Validate response correctness: Ensure endpoints return expected responses, not just that they respond at all.
• Generate actionable telemetry: Collect metrics and logs that integrate with Grafana Alerting for incident response.

In the next milestone, you’ll learn how to navigate to Synthetic Monitoring in Grafana Cloud.