Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2023

Understanding the Role of APIs in Web Development

As the complexities of web development have increased and more businesses are looking to leverage their online presence, Application Programming Interfaces have become a commonly used tool. An API acts as an intermediary between different software applications, allowing developers to streamline processes and increase efficiency when building websites. This blog post will discuss how they can help you advance your projects with ease.

The Ultimate Guide to Accessing & Using APIs

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are interface software programs that enable applications to communicate with one another through a series of protocols and definitions. They offer a standardized and secure way for apps to work together and provide the functionality and information requested without user intervention. You can think of an API as an entry point for an app or website.

API observability: Leveraging OTel to improve developer experience

APIs provide a way to simplify development, reduce costs, and create more flexible and scalable applications. Much of today’s development relies on APIs – in the integration of third-party services, in the communication between microservices, in mobile app development, and in other use cases. Some APIs even exist as products themselves for customers to use.

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How to Create a Kubernetes Preview Environment

A Kubernetes preview environment is an isolated environment that allows developers to test their code at any time without worrying about how others may be affected. While implementations and use cases may vary, simulating a production environment as closely as possible is the main goal. Imagine you're part of a team developing a complex API, and you've been tasked with adding a new endpoint that relies on features within the codebase currently being optimized by one of your team members. Although your team has a development environment with seeded databases and dev versions of dependencies, you run into issues when team members want to test their optimizations at the same time as you.

Playwright Explained

Playwright is an open-source framework for cross-browser automation and end-to-end web application testing. It was designed to be a fast, reliable, robust, and evergreen test automation framework, and its API supports modern rendering engines that include Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Playwright tests run on Windows, Linux, and macOS, locally or on your continuous integration pipeline, and headless or headed.

Monitoring our monitoring

Last Saturday, our API went down. Not even a funny error message or slightly slower responses either, it just completely vanished off the internet for 18 minutes. I'm not normally one to point fingers at my hosting provider when things go wrong (since ultimately, I chose to use them, so it's my problem to fix), but when fly.io publicly posts on their forums about their reliability issues, I may as well link to them.

Data & Traffic Are Key to Kubernetes Preview Environments

Preview environments are temporary environments where developers can test code changes before deploying them to production, also called ephemeral environments, they’re temporary and should be discarded after testing changes. Carrying out tests using accurate data is a major challenge when creating and destroying environments. Put differently, you need realistic data and traffic in the preview environment to reflect the performance of code changes in production.

Checkly Completes SOC 2 Type 2 Audit

In August 2022, Checkly's security team successfully implemented and documented all necessary security controls to be SOC 2 compliant for the first time. To get our SOC 2 Type 1 report we had to prove that our engineering, HR, operational, and IT security processes met the high level of information security SOC 2 compliance demands to an accredited auditing firm.

Public Dashboards, Incident Management, and Our New Analytics API

Late last year we announced improvements to our public dashboards that included a revamped dashboard design that allowed users to see monitoring data in a more easily-digestible way, on any device. We improved performance across the board, and also introduced new incident management functionality—available for paid plans only—that allows users to more easily communicate scheduled maintenance notices and alert developers to minor and major incidents.