Grafana Cloud
worldPing will reach end-of-life (EOL) on April 1, 2021.
This page includes details on what’s changed, helpful links, and key resources to assist you with the transition to synthetic monitoring, so you can take advantage of new capabilities to achieve the same goals.
Take the first step to get started with synthetic monitoring by signing up for a free Grafana Cloud account:
Google
GitHub
Microsoft
Important: Upcoming changes for worldPing users
worldPing will reach end-of-life (EOL) on April 1, 2021.
What will happen after April 1, 2021?
On April 1, 2021, all public probes will be disabled, which will disable your checks and alerts. No new data will be generated from your checks, and any alerts you’ve created in worldPing will no longer be fired.
If you’re using worldPing today, you need to transition from worldPing to synthetic monitoring in Grafana Cloud.
Why?worldPing was released in 2015 as an open source Grafana plugin to monitor performance and uptime of Internet applications. Grafana Labs has made significant improvements to worldPing over the past few years. It became time to unveil the newest iteration, now called synthetic monitoring and available via Grafana Cloud. Synthetic monitoring focuses on reducing complexity while taking advantage of Grafana Cloud capabilities. The majority of capabilities from worldPing are available in synthetic monitoring. Learn more about the decision to end-of-life worldPing in this blog post → |
What happens before April 1, 2021?Current worldPing users will continue to have full access to worldPing until April 1, 2021. To ensure a smooth transition from worldPing to synthetic monitoring, we encourage you to begin using synthetic monitoring in your Grafana Cloud account right away. Synthetic monitoring is available by default with Grafana Cloud.
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Action items for a successful transition
- Sign up for a free Grafana Cloud account.
- Follow the instructions in this tutorial to learn how to install and start running checks.
- If you need help understanding how features and setup compare between worldPing and Grafana Cloud, read this blog post.
Watch this video to get an introduction to synthetic monitoring, learn about additional features you’ll have access to in synthetic monitoring that weren’t available in worldPing, and see a live demo.
Synthetic monitoring 101
Synthetic monitoring helps you understand your users' experience and improve website performance by proactively monitoring your services. Synthetic monitoring is the best way to observe how systems and applications are performing by simulating the user experience. When you have the ability to look into services and applications “from the outside in,” it’s easier to manage your SLAs and SLOs and ensure uptime across your environment. With synthetic monitoring, you will be able to answer questions like:
- Is my website up?
- How fast is my site at this moment?
- Are transactions working?
- How cost-effective is my performance?
- If there is a slowdown or failure, where is it?
This type of monitoring can be done in many ways, but let’s break down three of the primary approaches — blackbox monitoring and whitebox monitoring — and why they’re important.
Learn more about synthetic monitoring →
worldPing vs. synthetic monitoring
What is worldPing?worldPing was a plugin for Grafana that would continually test, store, and alert on the global performance and availability of Internet applications so users could pinpoint issues, fix them immediately, and improve their customers' experience. |
What is synthetic monitoring?Synthetic monitoring is a key feature included with Grafana Cloud that allows you to observe how systems and applications are performing from a user’s point of view by monitoring applications and API endpoints from dozens of locations around the world. This feature surfaces the powerful capabilities of Prometheus blackbox exporter. |
The history of worldPing
Interested in the full background? Watch the worldPing v2 session from GrafanaCONline to learn about worldPing’s history.
What do worldPing and synthetic monitoring have in common?
Both worldPing and synthetic monitoring continually test, store and alert on the global performance and availability of your Internet applications so you can pinpoint issues, fix them immediately, and improve your users' experience.
Just as in worldPing, you can do the following in synthetic monitoring:
- Create different types of checks
- Set up alerts for those checks
- Leverage data to create visualizations and dashboards in Grafana
What is the difference between worldPing and synthetic monitoring?
Whereas worldPing was a great tool for an “at-a-glance” view of your infrastructure availability, the new synthetic monitoring feature takes the concepts behind this and improves on them by an order of magnitude.
Some of those key enhancements include:
- New, improved UI: worldPing attempts to discover a set of protocols to probe (ICMP, DNS, HTTP[S] endpoints) and then allows the configuration of these on the same page. However, this can lead to a lot of clutter, and it makes creating and updating checks cumbersome. Secondly, the worldPing home page offers a list of the endpoints being checked, as well as links to separate dashboards for the different protocol checks, but there is no easy way to get an “at-a-glance” overview of all the tested endpoints. Synthetic monitoring, meanwhile, has a simple and clean UI, with easy-to-use navigation, homepage, and checks list view. Our team is constantly iterating on the synthetic monitoring UX as well, with more improvements coming next quarter.
- Collecting metrics and logs on every check: With worldPing, we received regular inquiries from customers asking for help troubleshooting issues with the endpoints they were monitoring so they could fully understand why a check had failed. Synthetic monitoring is different because as each check runs, metrics and logs are collected and published to the user’s Grafana Cloud service. Metrics are published to Grafana Cloud metrics, and logs are published to Grafana Cloud logs. By adding logs from checks, users now have more data so they can troubleshoot more efficiently.
- Data is stored in Grafana Cloud: worldPing stores metrics in a dedicated time series database, which means that data is isolated and only contains data specific to worldPing. With synthetic monitoring, data is pushed directly into the user’s Grafana Cloud logs and metrics instances.
- Expanded blackbox monitoring capabilities: With the new blackbox exporter, users get key metrics, such as SSL certificate expiration times, TCP- and HTTP-based checks, as well as Ping and DNS checks.
- Alerting: Synthetic monitoring allows users to create alerts based on thresholds they define and leverages Grafana’s numerous notification channels to ensure these alerts are making their way to the right people.
To learn more about the improved and added capabilities of synthetic monitoring and a few other differences, read the documentation here.
FAQ
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1. How much will this new solution cost compared to worldPing? worldPing was priced per check. Variables that affect pricing included the number of checks, number of probes, and frequency. Check type did NOT affect pricing — all check types in worldPing cost the same. By comparison, synthetic monitoring is billed based on active series. Active series are calculated from the metrics and logs published. The amount of active series varies per check type, because different check types publish different metrics. There is a built-in calculator in the synthetic monitoring check form that shows you exactly how many active series you will be generating while creating a check. |
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2. What is happening to my worldPing data? We are shutting off public probes for worldPing, so checks and alerts will no longer run. worldPing users will still be able to log into worldPing to see their historical data, but no new data will be created because probes will no longer be running. |
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3. What if I have already started using Grafana Cloud? If you have already started using synthetic monitoring in Grafana Cloud, that’s great. Just be sure to transition all of your checks from worldPing before April 1 so you don’t lose any data. If you have a Grafana Cloud account, but haven’t started using synthetic monitoring yet, check out this tutorial to help you get started: How to get started quickly with the new synthetic monitoring feature in Grafana Cloud |
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4. Why were my South American probes not migrated to synthetic monitoring? Synthetic monitoring does not currently have probes in any South American data centers. You can use synthetic monitoring private probes and choose exactly where you want these to run. |
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5. Where did probe groups go? Synthetic monitoring does not currently support probe groups. |
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6. Why are my checks taking longer than it used to take in worldPing? Synthetic monitoring follows redirects, so perhaps the target is redirecting to another target, which could cause a longer response time. Check the resolve breakdown in the latency chart to verify. |
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7. What happened to my private probes? Why are my checks not running on them? We migrated the private probe configuration, but you need to get a synthetic monitoring probe token and run these probes. See Private probes to know more about how to run a private probe. |
The synthetic monitoring UI has a built-in calculator that shows the quantity of active series and log usage to expect for the check.
Pricing
Synthetic monitoring is a feature of Grafana Cloud and is billed using active series, just like other features of Grafana Cloud. Active series are calculated from the metrics and logs published. The amount of active series varies per check type, because different check types publish different metrics.
See Billing and usage for more information.
Resources
| Intro to synthetic monitoring - and Grafana Labs’ new iteration on worldPing Learn more → |
Grafana Tutorial: Simple synthetic monitoring for applications Learn more → |
Watch the "Getting started with synthetic monitoring" video Learn more → |
| Grafana Cloud Features: Synthetic monitoring Learn more → |
Documentation: Synthetic monitoring billing Learn more → |
Documentation: Getting started with synthetic monitoring Learn more → |
| Documentation: Getting started for past worldPing users Learn more → |