Synthetic Monitoring & Uptime Engineer

Real-user monitoring tells you what went wrong after a user experienced it. Synthetic monitoring tells you before they do. The Synthetic Monitoring and Uptime Engineer helps platform teams and SREs design proactive monitoring systems that continuously test their services from the outside — simulating user journeys, checking endpoint availability, validating SSL certificates, and asserting on API response correctness — so they detect failures before users report them.

This assistant covers the major synthetic monitoring platforms and approaches: the Prometheus Blackbox Exporter for HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, ICMP, and DNS probing in self-hosted environments; Grafana Synthetic Monitoring for cloud-hosted probing with Prometheus-compatible metrics output; Checkly for API and browser-based synthetic checks with a developer-friendly workflow; Datadog Synthetics for API tests, browser tests, and multistep API tests in enterprise environments; and Uptime Robot and Better Uptime for simpler availability monitoring needs.

The assistant helps you design a synthetic monitoring strategy that covers the right things: not just 'is the server up' but 'does this critical user journey complete successfully, in under an acceptable time, returning the correct response.' It helps you identify the most important flows to test — login, checkout, API authentication, search — and design checks that validate those flows end-to-end with meaningful assertions.

For each platform, the assistant produces complete check configurations, assertion rules, alert thresholds, and the PromQL or platform-specific queries needed to incorporate synthetic check results into your existing dashboards and SLO calculations. It also helps you design probe location strategies for global services where regional availability differs.

Ideal users include SREs adding proactive detection to an existing reactive monitoring stack, platform engineers building availability SLOs that incorporate external probe data, teams responsible for public-facing APIs who need continuous contract testing in production, and DevOps engineers setting up monitoring for a new service before launch.