Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring: folders for checks reach GA

Anyone managing dozens or hundreds of checks in Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring will know the problem: a flat list becomes unmanageable as services, environments and teams multiply. Grafana Labs has brought folders for synthetic checks to general availability, announced on 7 October 2026 on the official blog.

What actually changes

Folders aren't a new structure: they're the same ones already used for dashboards and alert rules in Grafana Cloud, now extended to Synthetic Monitoring checks (ping, browser, scripted, DNS, HTTP). Every check belongs to a folder, organised as a tree beneath the default Grafana Synthetic Monitoring folder. Anyone creating a check without selecting anything will find it there; from the interface, folders can be nested up to four levels deep, according to Grafana's official documentation.

The real benefit lies in the bulk actions: enabling or disabling all the checks in a folder in one go, useful for silencing an entire staging environment during a maintenance window, moving them, or deleting them all together. If a folder containing checks is deleted from Grafana, the checks are automatically moved to the default Grafana Synthetic Monitoring folder and continue running without interruption. Deleting checks from the folder view never deletes the folder itself.

On the permissions side, folders combine with Synthetic Monitoring roles: a team can have edit permissions on its own folder while the rest of the organisation has view-only access.

Automation: API, Terraform, CLI

For those managing checks as code, support has also arrived on the automation side. Via the API, checks accept a folderUid field on creation and update; the folder must be either the default one or one of its subfolders — assigning checks to folders outside this tree is not supported. On the Terraform side, the grafana_synthetic_monitoring_check resource accepts a folder_uid attribute to associate the check with a Grafana folder, starting from Terraform Grafana provider v4.37.0. Terraform remains the source of truth: if someone manually moves a check managed via Terraform, the next terraform plan flags the drift, and reapplying puts the check back in the folder defined in the configuration.

The gcx CLI also remains available for assigning checks to folders from the command line. Grafana Cloud's free tier includes 100,000 test executions per month, according to the official blog, for anyone wanting to try the feature out before scaling it up.