Feedback Request - Synthetic Exporter

[Aizik Friedman]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share a new exporter I’ve been working on: the Synthetic Exporter.

While blackbox_exporter is a great fit for HTTP and network-level probing, I ran into a gap when I needed to monitor multi-step UI flows that depend on DOM rendering and JavaScript.

Instead of setting up separate browser automation infrastructure or writing custom scripts that expose their own metrics, I built a standalone exporter in Go using Playwright. It’s intended as a complementary tool for this specific use case.

Key design choices:

• Declarative: UI journeys (goto, fill, click, wait_for_selector) are defined in a simple YAML config.

• Safe scraping: Browser scenarios run through background workers, decoupling Playwright execution from the /metrics scrape path and avoiding scrape timeouts.

• All-in-one: Also supports basic HTTP status checks and SSL certificate expiration monitoring, keeping related checks in a single configuration.

Repository: https://github.com/aizik-fridman/synthetic-exporter
Docs PR: https://github.com/prometheus/docs/pull/3061
Grafana Dashboard:  25651

I built this to solve a specific operational gap in my environment. I’ve also opened a PR to add it to the external exporters list, and would appreciate it if a maintainer could take a look when time permits.

Thanks,
Aizik

[Conall O'Brien]

This sounds extremely similar to the existing https://www.cloudprober.org , which also supports the same protocols as blackbox_exporter, plus headless browers and additional protocols too

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Conall O'Brien

[Aizik Friedman]

.Thanks for pointing me to Cloudprober

I'll take a look. Appreciate the pointer

‫בתאריך יום ו׳, 28 באוג׳ 2026 ב-16:20 מאת ‪Conall O'Brien‬‏ <‪con...@conall.net‬‏>:‬

[Bruno Orfao]

looks really good, will definitely have a play! Thanks for all your good work!

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[Alexander Wilke]

Why Not using Grafana k6 to do These Tests?

And maybe migrate existing playwright Scripts

https://grafana.com/docs/k6/latest/using-k6-browser/migrate-from-playwright-to-k6/

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[Aizik Friedman]

Hi guys,

Bruno - Thanks! Let me know how it goes. Feel free to open issues or PRs if you run into anything or have ideas for improvements.

Alexander - k6 is definitely a great tool. Regarding migrating existing scripts, the main goal of this exporter is actually to avoid writing and maintaining JS/Playwright scripts in the first place.

Instead, you define the steps in a simple YAML config, and the exporter handles the browser execution. It's intended as a lightweight tool for basic UI monitoring, rather than a full testing framework.

‫בתאריך יום ו׳, 28 באוג׳ 2026 ב-18:55 מאת ‪Alexander Wilke‬‏ <‪nachtf...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬