Grafana Cloud links Session Replay and synthetic checks for Digital Experience Monitoring

Grafana announced on 14 September 2026 the tighter integration between Session Replay and Synthetic Monitoring within Grafana Cloud, under the Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) banner. The stated goal: when something breaks in production, respond quickly to those affected with visibility of exactly what they saw, without having to manually reconstruct everything from metrics.

What changes in practice

Session Replay is part of Frontend Observability and is powered by Faro, Grafana's open source library for collecting real user monitoring data in the browser. It's activated by adding ReplayInstrumentation to Faro's initialization alongside the standard instrumentations. Recordings show mouse movements and DOM actions; private data is masked on the client side, so it never reaches Grafana Cloud. The player supports pause, ten-second skip, adjustable playback speed from 0.25x to 16x, skipping idle phases and a button to share the link to the exact moment in the session.

The most operationally useful feature concerns the link with Synthetic Monitoring: each execution of a browser check automatically generates a corresponding Frontend Observability session. From the dashboard of the failed check you can open that session directly, with replay, user journey and linked traces, to understand whether the check failure matches a real issue for users and how many it has affected.

Free tier numbers

For those budgeting, Grafana Cloud's public pricing remains the reference. The free tier is limited to 100,000 API test executions and 10,000 browser test executions per month, with community support. Beyond the free threshold, the Pro plan starts at $50 per 10,000 browser executions and $5 per 10,000 API executions, with a platform fee of $19 per month. Those using primarily browser checks for critical journeys will quickly exhaust the free quota, while API checks have more headroom.

For those wanting to try the integration, the technical documentation for Frontend Observability and Synthetic Monitoring is available on the Grafana Labs website, along with the Digital Experience Monitoring product page.