I find out services are down when users report it, not from my own alerts
By the time I know there’s a problem, it’s already affecting people
Checks run continuously from 20+ locations around the world. You get alerted the moment something degrades, before users encounter it.
When a check fails, you correlate it directly with metrics, logs, and traces in the same Grafana dashboard, so you’re not switching tools to investigate
Developer
I need to know if my endpoint is up and performing, especially after a release
No way to validate this without waiting for real traffic or a user complaint
HTTP, DNS, ping, and multi-step browser checks let you verify availability and performance at any time, including when real traffic is low
You can run checks against internal endpoints too, using private probes behind your firewall, not just public-facing URLs
Platform, DevOps Engineer
Synthetic monitoring setup is a pile of manually configured GUI checks
Nobody can review them, nobody versioned them, and nobody understands them except the person who set them up
Checks are defined as code using k6, versioned in Git, and deployed via Terraform or API, the same way you manage everything else in your stack
8 check types from simple pings to complex multi-step browser journeys, all manageable as code
VP Engineering, Engineering Manager
Paying for synthetic monitoring as part of a Datadog or New Relic contract
The cost has grown every time we’ve added a service or location
Execution-based pricing: you pay for what you run, not per seat or per host
100k API executions and 10k browser executions included free every month, and Synthetic Monitoring runs in the same Grafana Cloud instance you already have. No separate contract.