Synthetic Monitoring Check Authoring

Docs: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/testing/synthetic-monitoring/ Broad Grafana Cloud Testing entry point (SM + k6 Cloud + Faro): testing skill.

Reliability monitoring, not load testing

Synthetic Monitoring (SM) runs k6 as a reliability/availability engine: every check execution runs one iteration with one VU from each selected probe location on a fixed schedule. Success means "the user journey works right now, from this region" — detect outages before your customers do.

Do not apply load-testing idioms. There are no VUs to ramp, no stages, no load profiles, no soak/stress/spike phases, and no thresholds over aggregated traffic. Vocabulary: check, probe, execution, uptime, reachability, user journey validation — never "load test", "ramping", or "VUs".