Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring offers a robust solution for proactively monitoring the performance of critical applications globally, with a focus on TCP checks to detect connection failures and network issues that may impact user experience. TCP checks are particularly beneficial for monitoring database connections, mail server accessibility, FTP server file transfers, and message queue connectivity by testing connections on specific ports and measuring service availability and performance. The process of setting up a TCP check in Grafana Cloud involves creating an account, navigating to Synthetic Monitoring, selecting a check type, configuring request targets, setting timeouts, adding labels, choosing probe locations, determining test frequency, and configuring alerts. These checks provide real-time monitoring, security insights, and global validation, with results visualized through a preconfigured dashboard that updates continuously to ensure reliable service performance. Grafana Cloud offers a generous free tier to encourage users to leverage its synthetic monitoring capabilities.