How traceroute in the Synthetic Monitoring plugin for Grafana Cloud helps network troubleshooting

Synthetic Monitoring in Grafana Cloud, a black box monitoring tool, provides insights into application performance and uptime by observing external requests from around the world, highlighting user experiences. While it effectively determines whether requests succeed or fail, its traditional limitations are addressed by the new traceroute feature, which traces the path of a request through the internet. This enhancement allows users to visualize network paths, detect changes over time, and identify the number of hops to a destination, offering deeper insights into network issues between clients and servers. Traceroute helps determine whether problems originate inside or outside the network, thus clarifying potential external issues if certain locations experience failures while others do not. The tool requires no special configuration and invites user feedback for further development, while Grafana Cloud offers easy access to metrics and monitoring with a free tier and various plans.