Grafana Synthetic Monitoring vs Pingdom

Free tier available

From $18 per month (10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check, 50 SMS; $16.50 annual)

Cheap if you already run Grafana Cloud; results are plain Prometheus metrics you already know how to use.

Priced by a calculator rather than named tiers: 50 uptime checks run about $78/month and 100 about $149, so the per-check rate falls slowly with volume. Transaction checks and Real User Monitoring are priced separately from basic uptime checks and add up.

Included in the Grafana Cloud free tier with a monthly check allowance.

30-day trial.

Established

Grafana Labs · since 2021

Widely used

SolarWinds · since 2007

• Results are Prometheus metrics, so alerting and dashboards use tools you already have.
• Same k6 scripts serve load testing and synthetic monitoring.
• Good free tier within Grafana Cloud.

• Very large global probe network with a long operating history.
• Simple to set up for basic availability monitoring.
• Combines synthetic checks with real-user monitoring.

• Assumes you are in the Grafana ecosystem; standalone it makes little sense.
• Browser checks are less mature than Datadog's or Checkly's.
• Fewer probe locations than the dedicated vendors.

• Feature development has been slow under SolarWinds ownership.
• Transaction-check authoring is dated compared to code-first alternatives.
• Pricing is no longer competitive against newer entrants.

Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.

Organisations wanting an established name for straightforward uptime monitoring.