Hey folks, I’m a little confused about the requirements of the Synthetic Monitoring plugin: Several sources in the docs say that a Grafana Cloud account is required to make use of the plugin (e.g. https://github.com/grafana/synthetic-monitoring-app/#configuration|here) but my understanding was that I can install it in a local Grafana instance and use private probes running anywhere in my infrastructure. So is a Grafana Cloud really necessary to use this plugin? This would render it useless for my use case as it’s a very restricted environment.
There’s no Synthetic Monitoring plug-in for Local Grafana Instances
Not sure it’s that clear: https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/grafana-synthetic-monitoring-app/?tab=installation says “For local instances, plugins are installed and updated via a simple CLI command”.
Certainly it’s pre-installed and ready to use in Grafana Cloud but it’s still just a plugin.
Sorry to say but the “still just a plugin” part is pretty wrong
You got a ton of “Enterprise exclusive plug-ins”
And “Synthetic Monitoring” is a “Grafana Cloud dependant plug-in”
If you want to understand and “see in person” what I’m talking about, just spin-up a docker trial on grafana-enterprise:
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 --name=grafana -e "GF_INSTALL_PLUGINS=grafana-synthetic-monitoring-app" grafana/grafana-enterprise
And try to enable it. If you try to “Setup” the plug-in you’ll get a “Invalid provisioning”
… I admit, not the same but you can use K6 on your local environment and send metrics etc to your local Grafana
I am using it in our clusters for our non-production environments with Grafana OpenSource deployments…
That’s a pretty good idea. Thanks. I want to have a very simple “is the app up and responding” kind of monitoring so k6 with a very simple script should probably do it.
Indeed, I have some simple scripts as you said, just to get answer of “Are you there” and some complex ones emulating browser to click buttons, navigate, etc…
You can use K6 Operator to run the scripts and schedule via CronJob in K8s/
