Your team just deployed to production. The infrastructure spun up in 90 seconds, but recreating your monitoring? That’ll take hours. It’s added late in the process, managed through dashboards, and prone to inconsistency.
Short-term, this slows delivery and creates visibility gaps that surface only during incidents.
Long-term, it leaves a business-critical capability out of your observability pipeline.
Synthetic monitoring is essential for maintaining service reliability, protecting the digital experience, and meeting SLA commitments.
For regulated and global enterprises especially, codifying monitoring is essential for centralizing observability and ensuring consistency, visibility, and compliance at scale.
Why ClickOps breaks pipelines
Many teams set up synthetic monitoring manually via dashboards — a practice known as ClickOps. At first glance, it seems fast and flexible. But over time, it becomes a bottleneck.
ClickOps creates a cascade of risk, from drift to compliance gaps:
| Challenge | Impact |
|---|---|
| 1. Monitoring drift | Development, staging, and production environments diverge as changes are made manually. This is where misalignment begins. |
| 2. Inconsistency | Monitoring drift leads to varied setups across teams, regions, and environments. As a result, standards are hard to enforce. |
| 3. Blind spots | Inconsistency causes gaps. Critical monitors are missed or misconfigured, leaving issues to go undetected and services may fail silently. |
| 4. Compliance risk | Blind spots, lack of versioning, and manual changes leave no audit trail — putting SLA compliance and regulatory obligations at risk. |
When your monitoring doesn’t move at the speed of your infrastructure, you’re always one deployment ahead of your visibility.
The solution?
Bring Terraform to synthetic monitoring to eliminate drift, delay, and manual setup.
How Terraform bridges the gap
Terraform has progressed how teams manage infrastructure. Now, with the Uptrends Terraform Provider, it does the same for synthetic monitoring.
Just as you define servers, networks, and services in code, you can now define monitors, alerts, and permissions — embedding monitoring directly into your deployment workflows.
This shift brings multiple immediate benefits:
- Define monitors where they belong (in your repo). Version-controlled configs make every check reproducible and reviewable, just like your infrastructure.
- Deploy monitoring with every release. New service goes live? Monitors go live with it automatically through your CI/CD pipeline.
- Track every change, diff, and rollback. Every update lives in version control history, so you can audit or revert with confidence.
- Standardize at scale. Reuse Terraform modules and templates across teams and regions to eliminate drift and keep configs consistent everywhere.
Instead of relying on someone to remember to “set up monitoring later,” it’s now part of your delivery pipeline from day one.
What’s more, it lays the groundwork for full Observability-as-Code.
Feed your observability stack with codified monitoring
Codified synthetic monitoring becomes a key component of your observability pipeline, managed like any other telemetry signal.
With monitoring now codified:
- Observability is standardized — No more guessing how someone set up a monitor six months ago. Every test lives in code, shareable and reusable across teams.
- Governance and compliance are built in — Every configuration change is version-controlled, traceable, and aligned with policy through reusable templates and modules.
- You’re ready for integrations — Codified monitoring integrates more easily with centralized stacks, fitting into unified telemetry pipelines and observability platforms.
- End-to-end visibility scales consistently — Across teams, clouds, and regions.
For fast-moving teams, this code-first approach is more than a technical win.
It’s essential for maintaining control, resilience, and compliance at scale.
Get started without starting over
Already have 300 monitors? Don’t rebuild them.
With the Uptrends Terraform Provider, you can:
- Export existing monitors into Terraform-compatible config files.
- Build reusable modules for common patterns, like API uptime checks or SLA-based alerting.
- Integrate with version control to manage changes via code reviews and approvals.
- Deploy with your infrastructure so monitoring never lags behind your apps.
This unlocks scale, visibility, and resilience. Without suffering click fatigue.
Next steps: Bring monitoring into your codebase
Whether you’re codifying your first monitors or rolling out a global standard, the Uptrends Terraform Provider helps you integrate monitoring directly into your existing workflows.
All Enterprise customers have access to the Terraform Hub. Here you’ll find import files for your existing setup and everything you need to get started.
Synthetic monitoring no longer needs to be left behind.