How to Monitor Uptime with Grafana

If you already use Grafana for observability, adding uptime monitoring is a natural extension. Here’s how to set it up with both self-hosted and cloud approaches.

Option 1: Blackbox Exporter (Self-Hosted)

The Prometheus Blackbox Exporter probes endpoints via HTTP, TCP, DNS, and ICMP, exposing results as Prometheus metrics that Grafana can visualize.

Setup

1. Deploy Blackbox Exporter:

services:
  blackbox-exporter:
    image: prom/blackbox-exporter:latest
    ports:
      - "9115:9115"
    volumes:
      - ./blackbox.yml:/etc/blackbox_exporter/config.yml

2. Configure probes:

modules:
  http_2xx:
    prober: http
    timeout: 5s
    http:
      valid_http_versions: ["HTTP/1.1", "HTTP/2.0"]
      valid_status_codes: [200]
      method: GET
      follow_redirects: true
  tcp_connect:
    prober: tcp
    timeout: 5s
  dns_check:
    prober: dns
    timeout: 5s
    dns:
      query_name: "example.com"
      query_type: "A"

3. Configure Prometheus scraping:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'blackbox'
    metrics_path: /probe
    params:
      module: [http_2xx]
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - https://example.com
        - https://api.example.com/health
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        target_label: __param_target
      - source_labels: [__param_target]
        target_label: instance
      - target_label: __address__
        replacement: blackbox-exporter:9115

Key Metrics

• probe_success — 1 if probe succeeded, 0 if failed
• probe_duration_seconds — Total probe duration
• probe_http_status_code — HTTP response status code
• probe_ssl_earliest_cert_expiry — SSL certificate expiry timestamp

Grafana Dashboard

Create a dashboard with these panels:

• Uptime percentage — avg_over_time(probe_success[30d]) * 100
• Response time — probe_duration_seconds
• SSL expiry countdown — (probe_ssl_earliest_cert_expiry - time()) / 86400 (days until expiry)
• Status overview — Table showing all targets with current status

Alerting

# Grafana alert rule
- alert: EndpointDown
  expr: probe_success == 0
  for: 2m
  labels:
    severity: critical
  annotations:
    summary: "Endpoint {{ $labels.instance }} is down"

Option 2: Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring

If you use Grafana Cloud, Synthetic Monitoring is built in and runs checks from 20+ global locations without managing infrastructure.

Setup

1. Go to Grafana Cloud → Synthetic Monitoring
2. Add a new check (HTTP, multi-step, DNS, TCP, or traceroute)
3. Select probe locations
4. Configure alerting rules
5. View results in pre-built dashboards

Advantages Over Self-Hosted

• Multi-region by default — Probes run from multiple global locations
• No infrastructure — No Prometheus or Blackbox Exporter to manage
• Pre-built dashboards — Instant visibility without configuration
• Integrated alerting — Uses Grafana’s alerting system

Limitations

• 5 checks on free tier — Limited for comprehensive monitoring
• Costs scale — More checks = higher bill
• Less customizable — Can’t modify probe behavior like self-hosted

Limitations of Grafana for Uptime Monitoring

Whether self-hosted or cloud, Grafana as a monitoring tool has gaps:

• No built-in status pages — You need a separate tool for public-facing status
• Single-region (self-hosted) — Blackbox Exporter runs from one location without complex multi-instance setups
• Requires Prometheus knowledge — Not a turnkey uptime monitoring solution
• No native incident management — Alerting only, no incident lifecycle tracking

When to Use Grafana vs Dedicated Tools

Use Grafana when:

• You already run Prometheus/Grafana for infrastructure
• You want monitoring data alongside existing dashboards
• You have engineering capacity to maintain the setup

Use a dedicated tool (like Warden) when:

• You need multi-region monitoring without managing multiple Prometheus instances
• You need built-in status pages and incident communication
• You want a turnkey solution with minimal setup
• You need sub-minute check intervals from multiple locations

The best approach for many teams: use Grafana for infrastructure dashboards and a dedicated uptime tool for external availability monitoring. Warden can export metrics to Prometheus, giving you the best of both worlds.

Related tools:

• Uptime Calculator — Calculate SLA targets and downtime
• Latency Percentile Calculator — Analyze probe response times