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Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring¶
What it is¶
Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring is Grafana's managed
synthetic monitoring product: you script a
journey or declare a target (e.g. a browser check on /checkout), run it on a
schedule from known probe locations, and get clean, consistent,
alertable results. When a check fails or a metric deviates from baseline, it
pinpoints the exact location, steps, and assertions responsible (Source:
sources/2026-08-24-grafana-from-failed-check-to-real-user-impact-pairing-synthetic-monitoring-and-frontend-observability).
It is the outside-in signal in Grafana Cloud's reliability story — the canary that warns early and reliably that something broke, before users report it.
What it does and doesn't answer¶
- Answers: did the journey break, from where, at which step, on which assertion.
- Does not answer: who was affected, how many, how badly. Those are blast-radius properties of real traffic that a controlled, scheduled test cannot observe — supplied instead by Frontend Observability (Source: sources/2026-08-24-grafana-from-failed-check-to-real-user-impact-pairing-synthetic-monitoring-and-frontend-observability).
Pairing with Frontend Observability¶
The load-bearing product feature is a direct link from a failed synthetic check into the corresponding real user sessions in Frontend Observability, built "to skip manual timestamp-matching and url-hunting." This is what makes the closed-loop reliability workflow fast — see synthetic-alert-to-rum-pivot. Real-user data flowing back the other way turns into new synthetic checks (rum-gap-to-synthetic-check).
Synthetic check scripting in the Grafana stack builds on k6 for scripted/browser checks; a synthetic-check-investigation skill also ships with gcx.
Seen in¶
- sources/2026-08-24-grafana-from-failed-check-to-real-user-impact-pairing-synthetic-monitoring-and-frontend-observability
— the outside-in half of the synthetic↔RUM loop;
/checkout-from-Frankfurt worked example.
Related¶
- systems/grafana-cloud — the managed platform it runs on.
- systems/grafana-frontend-observability — the RUM counterpart it links into.
- systems/k6 — scripting engine for checks.
- synthetic-monitoring — the technique.
- closed-loop-reliability — the loop it participates in.
- companies/grafana.