---
title: "Synthetic Monitoring | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "Learn about Synthetic Monitoring and how it can give you insight into how your applications and services are behaving with our black-box monitoring solution."
---

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

# Synthetic Monitoring

Test applications and services by creating checks that continuously run against remote targets from probe locations around the world, and assess their availability, performance, and correctness.

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## Overview

[Synthetic Monitoring](/grafana/plugins/grafana-synthetic-monitoring-app) is part of Grafana Cloud. It uses black-box monitoring to test the externally visible behavior of your systems, the way a user reaches them, instead of relying on instrumentation in their code or infrastructure. Synthetic Monitoring lets you assess your systems’ availability, performance, and correctness by emulating user behavior from global probe locations.

Each execution of a check simulates a single user from one probe location. For scripted and browser checks, the execution runs one [iteration](/docs/k6/latest/reference/glossary/#iteration): one run of the script’s test function, which can include multiple requests or interactions. This ensures consistent, lightweight monitoring that reflects real-world access patterns and allows for alerting and predictable scheduling.

Give it a try using Grafana Play

With Grafana Play, you can explore and see how it works, learning from practical examples to accelerate your development. This feature can be seen on [Synthetic Monitoring](https://play.grafana.org/a/grafana-synthetic-monitoring-app/home).

[Try it](https://play.grafana.org/a/grafana-synthetic-monitoring-app/home)

## Explore

[Introduction  
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Learn more about the key benefits and features that are available with Synthetic Monitoring.](./introduction/)

[Get started  
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Get started and create your first check. Learn how to visualize the logs and dashboard.](./get-started/create-your-first-check/)

[Set up  
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Explore the set up options for Synthetic Monitoring.](./set-up/)

[Create checks  
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Learn more about the available check types you can use to test your services.](./create-checks/checks/)

[Analyze results  
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Interpret what your checks report, from the overview dashboard down to a single execution.](./analyze-results/)

[Configure alerts  
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Get notified when a check fails, a TLS certificate is about to expire, or latency crosses a threshold.](./configure-alerts/configure-per-check-alerts/)

[Manage users and teams  
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Control who can view and edit checks using basic roles and RBAC.](./user-and-team-management/)

[REST API  
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Create and manage checks programmatically.](./api-reference/)