How to run checks on internal services with Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring

Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring offers a solution for monitoring internal services within private networks through the use of private probes, which enhance visibility into services like APIs, staging environments, or resources behind firewalls without making them publicly accessible. These private probes are self-hosted agents that run inside a network, performing various checks such as browser, ping, DNS, HTTP, and TCP, and transmit the results back to Grafana Cloud, thus providing observability and alerting capabilities akin to those for public-facing services. The process of setting up a private probe involves deploying a probe agent and configuring synthetic checks within environments like Kubernetes, Docker, or Ubuntu, ensuring that services running on private networks are monitored effectively without exposure to the public internet. This setup allows users to validate service availability and performance from the same environment that internal systems depend on, with the added benefit of Grafana Cloud's generous free tier for getting started with synthetic monitoring.