Synthetic private probe

What is a private probe?

Use SolarWinds Observability Digital Experience private probes to monitor your internally and externally hosted website or URI entities, such as internal applications behind firewalls, or services restricted to specific networks.

The Digital Experience private probe connects to SolarWinds Observability through the Synthetics Collector service which acts as an API Gateway for private probes. The service provides gRPC endpoints for probe auto registration, polling schedules, sending results, and status updates.

The Synthetic collector is publicly reachable from the internet so that private probes can be deployed outside of the SolarWinds Observability infrastructure. Private probes are authenticated in SolarWinds Observability by using the API Token of type Ingestion.

To Deploy your private probe, you must complete the following.

Review the System Requirements to ensure your system meets the required standards.
Create a new ingestion token in SolarWinds Observability and configure it in the private probe.
Configure the private probe with the service URL that corresponds to the data cell of the SolarWinds Observability organization. The connection with SolarWinds Observability is encrypted and minimum TLS 1.2 is required.
If you are using the Agent based private probe, you must install a SolarWinds Observability Agent on a supported Linux host in your private network.

How does the private probe run?

The private probe can be run in one of three ways, through the Agent plugin, as a docker container, or through Kubernetes.

SolarWinds Observability Agent- the private probe plugin installed on the SolarWinds Observability Agent on a supported Linux distribution.
- The Private Probe plugin starts the private probe binary and check executors on the host, registers a new private probe in SolarWinds Observability
Docker – a single container on a host or in a simple container environment.
Kubernetes – a Deployment, DaemonSet, or sidecar within your Kubernetes cluster.

What type of monitoring is supported?

The following Digital Experience entities are supported.

Website entities with http/https protocols
URI entities with Ping or TCP checks

The following Digital Experience entities are not supported.

URI entities with DNS or UDP checks
Synthetic transactions
Page speed checks
Web entities that use secrets

Confirm your system requirements

Before you add a private probe in your environment, review the system requirements to make sure you have the base resources that are required for connectivity.

Manage your private probe through the SolarWinds Observability Agent

A SolarWinds Observability Agent based private probe is the same Digital Experience private probe engine delivered as a Agent plugin that runs inside the SolarWinds Observability Agent for Linux (Agent) instead of a standalone Docker container, or Kubernetes deployment.

What are the benefits of installing the private probe plugin on the SolarWinds Observability Agent?

Having the private probe as a part of the SolarWinds Observability Agent offers several benefits, including:

Centralized lifecycle management (install, start/stop, auto-update) through the SolarWinds Observability Agent.
Add, edit, and delete private probes through the SolarWinds Observability interface (no Docker or Kubernetes experience required).
Access to Agent features such as health checks, logs, and custom certificate configuration for the plugin.

See the topics below for information about adding, updating, or deleting your private probe with the SolarWinds ObservabilityAgent.

Manage your private probe through Docker

SolarWinds recommends adding a private probe through Docker if you're not familiar with Kubernetes. See the topics below for information about adding, updating, or deleting your private probe on Docker.