One of the powerful tools available in Grafana Cloud is Synthetic Monitoring, a black box monitoring solution that can provide insights that are hard to get in other ways. It provides a different view of your application by observing performance and uptime externally and from all over the world. As a result, you can build an understanding of what your end users are actually experiencing. However, as great as it is, synthetic monitoring does have limitations.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) reduce latency by delivering cached data (e.g., JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos) from a network of linked proxy servers to end users around the globe. CDNs help reduce the load on your origin servers and shorten the distance that data needs to travel, thus improving the end-user experience.

Continuous integration (CI) has become the mainstream approach to software development as it enables organizations to iterate quickly while minimizing the risk of releasing faulty code. To implement CI, many organizations rely on Jenkins—one of the most mature and widely used automation servers on the market. Jenkins comes with hundreds of community-backed plugins to help you easily integrate it with other tools in your development workflow.

We maintain a highly optimised browser automation stack in order to provide the most stable environment for our customers to run their Selenium scripts in. Our goal is to deliver the best user experience for writing and maintaining a synthetic script and configuring the browser environments it runs in. The synthetic monitor data we produce is used for simulating website processes such as form-based authentication, eCommerce transactions, and regulatory checks.

Testing early and often throughout the software development process (shift-left testing) helps teams stay agile and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new updates. Datadog Synthetic CI/CD Testing enables you to implement shift-left testing throughout your CI/CD pipeline so that your team can prevent faulty code deployments from degrading your end user experience.

We often hear from Grafana Cloud users who are asking for guidelines on how to write better alerts on synthetic monitoring metrics and get notified when synthetic monitoring detects a problem. We already ship a predefined alert in Grafana Cloud synthetic monitoring. A predefined alert that we ship is alerting on the probe_all_success_sum metric and makes use of the alert sensitivity config to create multiple Grafana Cloud alerting rules. Check out synthetic monitoring alerting docs for details.