Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

August 2022

Fire up new Browser checks with our new templates

Let’s admit it: end-to-end testing is a technical challenge. How do you make features testable? What testing framework should you use? When should you run your test suite? There are so many things to learn and consider. At Checkly, we want to ease end-to-end monitoring so that you can focus on shipping excellent software instead of figuring out how you monitor and test it. But before getting into our latest feature addition, let me answer the above questions.

High Scale Postman Load Testing for Kubernetes

In this Postman load testing tutorial, you’ll learn how to run a large scale load test in Kubernetes using your existing Postman collections. Because HTTP services don’t have a graphical user interface, it’s common to build collections of requests using Postman during the development process. These collections are useful for running quick functionality tests as you develop each endpoint.

How to always match the correct DOM elements with Playwright's strict mode

Playwright's "page" object provides multiple methods to interact with DOM elements ("click", "fill", etc.). But these methods come with one downside: they're not strict. Learn in this video why strict mode is important and how locator method help to write better test cases.

Stop Using TCP Health Checks for Kubernetes Applications

As developers, one of the most important things we can consider when designing and building applications is the ability to know if our application is running in an ideal operating condition, or said another way: the ability to know whether or not your application is healthy. This is particularly important when deploying your application to Kubernetes. Kubernetes has the concept of container probes that, when used, can help ensure the health and availability of your application.

Monitor your gRPC APIs with Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

gRPC is an open-source Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework developed by Google and released in 2016. Although gRPC is still relatively new, large organizations are adopting it in increasing numbers to build APIs that connect complex microservice meshes that use disparate languages and frameworks. gRPC-based APIs can perform requests up to seven times faster than REST APIs and enable customers to easily implement SSL authentication, load balancing, and tracing via plug-in libraries.

Considerations When You Mock APIs Inside of Kubernetes

Today it’s not unusual to see organizations having implemented mocking in their daily workflow, as mock APIs allow developers to speed up their development and not rely on external services. For those reasons and others, many engineers are looking to learn more about the mocked APIs and how they can best be implemented into their organization.

InfluxDB Python Client Library: A Deep Dive into the WriteAPI

InfluxDB is an open-source time series database. Built to handle enormous volumes of time-stamped data produced from IoT devices to enterprise applications. As data sources for InfluxDB can exist in many different situations and scenarios, providing different ways to get data into InfluxDB is essential. The InfluxDB client libraries are language-specific packages that integrate with the InfluxDB v2 API. These libraries give users a powerful method of sending, querying, and managing InfluxDB.

Video: Cloud Native Traffic Replay

With the introduction of new application platforms like Kubernetes, oftentimes the DevOps tooling around it needs to evolve. Cloud Native technology is powerful but complex. This 5 minute demo video shows how Speedscale provides production simulation capabilities so you can check for resiliency, quality and scalability in your Kubernetes clusters. You can record data and traffic in production and replay sanitized traffic on the fly against a new cluster.

Top API Metrics for Different Teams That You Should Monitor

Building and utilizing modern applications now essentially requires APIs. They are a crucial component of every company's automated workflow, and as more customers depend on your APIs to power their applications, the demand for them to be trustworthy is growing. Your business will suffer if its performance, availability, or health degrades, thus proactive API monitoring is essential to ensure its dependability. We'll go through the most important API metrics in this article.

Restrict API Access with Client Certificates (mTLS)

An application programming interface (API) provides access to the features of a business application, but with the visual elements stripped away. By using APIs, devices like tablets, self-service kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, and robotic sensors can connect up to apps running on servers in a datacenter or in the cloud. Because they give access to the heart of your business applications, it should come as no surprise that there are some APIs that the general public should not have access to.

Performance Monitoring with API

If you are in a room with 20 engineers and you ask, “explain what an API is to a non-technical person”, you will get 20 different analogies. An API is like the on button to your TV connecting you to a variety of shows and systems, or an API is like a waiter taking your order and serving you from the kitchen. An API is like a library card catalog, or it’s simply a tool that connects you to other tools.

GitHub Browser check synchronization goes into public beta

One of our goals here at Checkly is to make it easier for developers to ship excellent software. But let’s face it, getting features out is only a tiny fraction of the story. Fast-moving development teams also break things. And the more things you build, the more things can go wrong. And trust me, they will. This is where API and end-to-end monitoring helps. Define automated test suites that check all your properties constantly and guarantee that everything’s up and running. All the time.

APIs vs Webhooks: The Key Differences, and When to Use Them in Your Web Apps

Advancements in technology have led to the evolvement of web development, making it necessary for applications to communicate effectively. To meet the rising demand for communication by modern technology, we have to find the right means through which different technologies can communicate. This is where APIs and Webhooks come into play. APIs and Webhooks play a vital role in enabling the relaying and syncing of data between different applications. That notwithstanding, the two work differently and have been designed to serve different functions.
Sponsored Post

Datadog & Speedscale: Improve Kubernetes App Performance

By combining traffic replay capabilities from Speedscale with observability from Datadog, SRE Teams can deploy with confidence. It makes sense to centralize your monitoring data into as few silos as possible. With this integration, Speedscale will push the results of various traffic replay conditions into Datadog so it can be combined with the other observability data. Being able to preview application performance by simulating production conditions allows better release decisions. Moreover, a baseline to compare production metrics can provide even earlier signals on degradation and scale problems. Speedscale joined the Datadog Marketplace so customers can shift-left the discovery of performance issues.

Monitor Your AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs with Simplicity

TL;DR: Dashbird launched observability for AWS AppSync. Additionally to AWS Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB, API Gateway, ECS, Kinesis, Step Functions, ELB, SNS, RDS, OpenSearch, and HTTP API Gateway you can now get detailed insights and metrics in the Dashbird app for AWS AppSync. Since Facebook released its previously internally used query language GraphQL in 2016, it has seen an outstanding increase in adoptions for all kinds of applications.

What's a Webhook?

If you’re a developer or site reliability engineer, you might have noticed options to use webhooks in your cloud monitoring or automation settings. And if you have a great deal of experience developing APIs, you probably know what a webhook is. For the rest of the world, a webhook (also known as a web callback or an HTTP push API) is a way for an application to provide other applications with information in real time.

Setting up a Multi-Architecture Kubernetes Cluster

In the last post we covered the industry shift towards ARM machines for both local and production software engineering. Last time we learned how to create Docker images that would work on multiple architectures for dev machines. Now we want to take this portability and leverage it for cost savings in production. You may be able to transition some of your services into multi-architecture builds.

Datadog acquires Seekret

APIs are integral to the success of modern enterprises across a wide range of industries, such as finance, logistics, and manufacturing. They not only enable developers to build powerful business solutions by integrating with external applications, but also facilitate communication between internal services. This means that the ability to build reliable, highly-performant APIs—and govern their behavior and performance—is more important than ever.