Telegraf's http_response input plugin allows for synthetic monitoring by creating requests that simulate user activity to test externally visible behavior. This complements white-box monitoring which provides insight into internal functioning, and is especially useful as an alerting signal for paging. The plugin can gather many white-box metrics using application-specific plugins, and you can instrument your applications using the InfluxDB client libraries. It allows flexibility in terms of how to monitor applications by specifying URLs to query, request methods, custom requests bodies or headers, and regular expression verification. This provides a lot of flexibility for creating monitoring checks that come from outside the system. By setting up an independent infrastructure, you can run Telegraf on your Mac or another external device to collect data about influxdata.com. The plugin queries the InfluxData homepage and looks for specific strings in the response, and individual plugins can define their own collection interval. This provides end-to-end coverage that's useful in catastrophic scenarios when used in conjunction with white box tools.