Monitoring
Monitoring
Monitoring is one of the most important practices in running a production application. It is often the first thing teams skip -- until something goes wrong. You should be monitoring your application from day one to ensure that it is working as expected and delivering the best possible experience to your users.
Focus on the key signals: response times, error rates, and resource usage. Monitor your infrastructure as well, to ensure it can handle the traffic your application receives. In some cases you may discover that your environment has more resources allocated than it needs, giving you an opportunity to optimise and reduce costs.
There are many tools available to help you with monitoring, including:
Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring
Grafana Cloud provides a suite of tools for observability. For uptime monitoring specifically, it offers Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring. This tool allows you to continuously test your application from multiple locations worldwide, ensuring that it remains available and performs well for your users.
Key Features of Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring
1. Global Monitoring
One of the biggest advantages of using Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring is that it allows you to monitor your application from multiple geographic locations. This helps ensure that users from different regions experience consistent performance and availability.
2. Uptime and Performance Monitoring
You can set up HTTP checks to verify that your application is online and responding within acceptable time limits. If response times increase, Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring can alert you before users start experiencing major slowdowns.
3. Alerting and Incident Response
You can configure alerts to notify you when your application goes down or when it performs slower than expected. Alerts can be sent via multiple channels, including Slack, email, and webhooks, so you can respond quickly.
4. SSL and Domain Monitoring
A commonly overlooked aspect of application uptime is SSL certificate and domain expiry. Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring allows you to monitor both, ensuring that your website does not go down unexpectedly due to an expired certificate or lapsed domain.
5. API Monitoring
Apart from simple HTTP checks, you can also monitor API endpoints by sending requests with custom headers and checking response times, status codes, and response bodies. This is useful for applications that depend on third-party services or microservices.
6. Flexible Check Intervals
You can configure how frequently your checks run, from every few seconds to several minutes, depending on your needs. More frequent checks provide faster insights but consume more storage and processing resources.
Real-World Example: Using Synthetic Monitoring for a Laravel Application
Here is a practical example of how to set up Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring for a Laravel application:
- Set up an HTTP check -- Configure a simple HTTP check that pings your application's health endpoint every 30 seconds.
- Configure alerts -- Set up alerts to notify you on Slack when the response time exceeds 500ms or if the application goes down entirely.
- Monitor SSL expiry -- Add SSL monitoring to ensure that your certificates remain valid and do not lapse unexpectedly.
This setup catches issues before users report them, improving both uptime and reliability.
Comparing Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring with Other Tools
| Feature | Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring | New Relic | Datadog | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global Monitoring | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |
| Free Tier Available | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| SSL Monitoring | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |
| Alerting & Notifications | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Simple Setup | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No |
If you are looking for an easy-to-use, cost-effective solution for uptime monitoring, Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring is a strong choice.
Step-by-Step Guide: Setting Up Synthetic Monitoring
To set up synthetic monitoring in Grafana Cloud, follow these steps:
- Sign up for Grafana Cloud -- Grafana Cloud offers a free tier with synthetic monitoring included.
- Create a new Synthetic Monitoring check -- Choose an endpoint to monitor and configure the check settings.
- Set up alerting -- Connect alert channels such as Slack or email to receive notifications.
- Analyse performance data -- Use Grafana dashboards to visualise trends and identify issues before they impact users.
Integrating Synthetic Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana Dashboards
If you are already using Prometheus, you can integrate Synthetic Monitoring data into your Grafana dashboards for a unified monitoring solution:
- Enable Prometheus metrics export in Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring.
- Add Prometheus as a data source in your Grafana instance.
- Create a new dashboard to visualise uptime, response times, and alert history.
This lets you correlate synthetic monitoring data with infrastructure metrics, giving you a complete picture of your application's health.
Final Thoughts
Monitoring is a crucial part of running a stable and reliable application. Without it, you may not realise an issue exists until your users start reporting problems. Tools like Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring provide a powerful, cost-effective way to ensure that your application remains available, performant, and secure.
If you are not already monitoring your application, start now -- the sooner you have visibility, the sooner you can act on it.