Documentation Grafana Cloud Observe and act Test and validate Synthetic Monitoring Set up Private probes

Set up private probes

A private probe is a probe that you install in your environment or another location you choose. It runs tests against your targets by sending requests and recording the responses.

Unlike public probes operated by Grafana Labs, private probes are only accessible to you and only write data to your Grafana Cloud account. Private probes are instances of the open source Grafana Synthetic Monitoring Agent.

Before you begin

• You must have the Admin role in Grafana to access the Synthetic Monitoring config page.
• Install and configure Synthetic Monitoring before adding a private probe.
• Installing from the Grafana APT repository on amd64-based Debian and Ubuntu systems is the only packaging option provided. On other systems, you need to build the agent from source.
• You can install multiple private probes. Each private probe has its own unique Probe Authentication Token.

Add a new probe in your Grafana instance

1. Navigate to Testing & synthetics > Synthetics > Probes.
2. Click Add Private Probe.
3. Enter a Probe Name.
4. Enter a Latitude and Longitude to see an accurate location on the map panel.
5. Enter a Region. Defaults are AMER, EMEA, and APAC, but you may define your own.
6. Optionally enter up to three custom labels to identify your probe. Probe labels can’t use reserved system label names. Refer to System labels.
7. Click Save.
8. Copy the Probe Authentication Token and save it for the next step.

Probe API Server URL

Based on the region of your stack, you need to use a different API server URL when setting up a private probe. If you are unsure about the region of your stack, go to your Grafana instance and the Config page under Synthetic Monitoring and search for backend address.