Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring + Alert24 Healthcheck

Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring is the hosted version of Grafana's uptime probing. It runs HTTP checks from Grafana's global probe network, stores results as Prometheus metrics in your Grafana Cloud stack, and integrates directly with Grafana Alerting — no infrastructure to manage. This is distinct from the self-hosted Blackbox Exporter setup.

Before you start

You'll need:

• An Alert24 API key (Settings → API Keys → Create API Key)
• The ID of the check you want to monitor, found in Monitoring → [check name] or via the API
• A Grafana Cloud account with Synthetic Monitoring enabled (available on all plans including free)

Add an HTTP check

1. In Grafana Cloud, open the left nav and go to Synthetic Monitoring → Checks
2. Click + Add new check
3. Set Check type to HTTP
4. Enter a Job name (e.g. alert24-production-api)
5. Paste your healthcheck URL into the Target field:

   https://app.alert24.net/api/healthcheck/ak_live_YOUR_KEY/YOUR_CHECK_ID
   

6. Set Frequency (60 seconds is a good default)
7. Under Probe locations, select the regions to probe from
8. Under Advanced HTTP settings → Validation, confirm Valid status codes includes only 200 — remove 2xx if it's listed as a range and add 200 explicitly to ensure 503 is treated as a failure
9. Click Save

Grafana Cloud immediately starts probing from your selected locations and publishing probe_success, probe_http_status_code, and latency metrics into your Grafana Cloud Prometheus instance.

Org-wide check

To monitor all active Alert24 checks as a single synthetic probe:

https://app.alert24.net/api/healthcheck/ak_live_YOUR_KEY

Set up an alert

Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring integrates with Grafana Alerting. To get notified when the check fails:

1. Go to Alerting → Alert rules → + New alert rule
2. Set the data source to grafanacloud--prom
3. Use this PromQL expression:

   avg_over_time(probe_success{job="alert24-production-api"}[5m]) < 1
   

4. Set evaluation to every 1m with a pending period of 2m to avoid flapping alerts
5. Attach a Contact point (email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.)
6. Click Save rule

View results in dashboards

Synthetic Monitoring automatically creates a dashboard for each check. Navigate to Synthetic Monitoring → Checks → [your check] and click View dashboard to see uptime history, latency by probe location, and error logs.

You can also use these metrics in your own dashboards:

Filter by job="alert24-production-api" or instance="https://app.alert24.net/..." to isolate your Alert24 checks.

Tips

• Multiple checks: Add one Synthetic Monitoring check per Alert24 monitor ID, then group them in a Grafana dashboard using a job=~"alert24-.*" label matcher.
• Probe selection: Grafana Cloud probes from locations like Atlanta, Frankfurt, Singapore, and São Paulo. Pick locations closest to where your users (and your services) are for the most meaningful latency data.
• vs. Blackbox Exporter: If you already run a self-hosted Prometheus stack, use the Blackbox Exporter guide instead. Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring is the right choice if you want zero-infrastructure probing with metrics that land directly in your Grafana Cloud stack.