Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2024

If You Are an API and You Know It..

The API economy is taking over the world of data exchange. They are everywhere, from tech companies to grocery chains. With massive growth, security, and observability are a concern since creating the right telemetry is often an afterthought, and companies do not understand the scope of the issue till they are breached or have performance issues.

How to use Tailscale for gRPC authentication in Golang

Friends of this blog know that I am a big fan of building internal tools, or as we call them, "tools that help scale people". As the name suggests, internal tools are used, well, internally and as such usually will require their access to be restricted to the company's staff and network. In the past, I've written about how to use Tailscale for authentication of internal tools using HTTP. In this post, I will show you how to use Tailscale for gRPC authentication in Golang.

Track Errors in FastAPI for Python with AppSignal

When you first try a new library or framework, you are excited about it. However, as soon as you run something on production, things are less than ideal — an error here, an exception there - bugs everywhere! You start reading your logs, but you often lack context, like how often an error happens, in what line, etc. Fortunately, tools such as AppSignal can help. AppSignal helps you track your errors and gives you a lot of valuable insights.

Avoid flaky end-to-end tests due to poorly hydrated Frontends with Playwright's toPass()

In this video we'll dive into the world of flaky tests in Playwright and synthetic monitoring with Checkly. We examine a site with poor Frontend hydration patterns, their effect on test stability, and how to work around them. Learn how to avoid using artificial delays and implementing a retry mechanism with Playwright's 'toPass()' method to achieve stable testing instead.

How to automate image analysis with the ChatGPT vision API and Grafana Cloud Metrics

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has an extraordinary ability to process natural language, reason about a user’s prompts, and generate human-like conversation in response. However, as the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words” — and perhaps an even more significant achievement is ChatGPT’s ability to understand and answer questions about images.

Why you should monitor microservice mediator APIs

Microservice mediator APIs provide a flexible, scalable, and decentralized approach to microservices communication, enabling organizations to build robust, modular, and maintainable applications. They shield microservices from the details of the other implementations and promote loose coupling, helping to ensure autonomy, scalability, and independence among microservices.

How to use HTTP APIs to send metrics and logs to Grafana Cloud

Integrating monitoring and logging into your application stack is crucial for maintaining performance, enhancing security, and streamlining troubleshooting. Grafana Cloud offers a robust solution for monitoring your applications by collecting metrics and logs using an agent, such as Grafana Agent, but there are many environments where this isn’t feasible.

Add accessibility checks to your Playwright end-to-end tests

Join us in today's video as we dive into the world of web accessibility testing with "axe-core". "axe-core" is used in Google Chrome's lighthouse and is quickly integrated in your Playwright end-to-end tests. We'll integrate "axe-core/playwright", detect accessibility issues, attach these to test reports and even integrate accessibility checks in Checkly's synthetic monitoring thanks to a new beta runtime.

Running Your Playwright Tests in Parallel or in Sequence

Playwright offers robust capabilities for automating browser tests. A common question among developers, however, revolves around the best practices for structuring Playwright projects, especially when tests involve significant environment changes, resource creation, or database updates. This blog post describes strategies for running Playwright tests either in parallel or in sequence, optimizing your testing workflow for efficiency and reliability.

Improve Your Playwright Documentation with Steps

When you’re implementing automated testing, clarity and maintainability of test scripts are as crucial as the tests themselves. Playwright offers a feature that enhances the readability and ease of debugging of your tests: test steps. This article explores how to use test steps in Playwright to document your test cases effectively.

Integrating OpenTelemetry Instrumentation with FastAPI

What do we gain when we integrate OpenTelemetry with FastAPI? Integrating OpenTelemetry with FastAPI offers many benefits that greatly improve the observability and monitoring capabilities of applications built on this high-performance web framework. By integrating OpenTelemetry's instrumentation capabilities into FastAPI projects, you can understand your applications' inner workings, enabling them to monitor, analyze, and optimize performance.

Integrating Accessibility Checks in Playwright Tests with Checkly

Ensuring your web application is accessible is not just about compliance; it's about inclusivity. Tools like Google Chrome's Lighthouse provide a starting point for accessibility checks. but integrating these checks into your development workflow can significantly enhance the quality of your product. This post explores how to perform automated accessibility checks using Playwright and Checkly, leveraging the power of the axe-core library.

New in Playwright: detect and close unpredictable overlays with "addLocatorHandler"

Discover the latest feature of Playwright 1.42 — `page.addLocatorHandler`. If you're tired of randomly appearing cookie banners breaking your end-to-end tests or want to automatically close all these intercom widgets, this method is right up your alley. With `addLocatorHandler`, handling elements that randomly pop up becomes a breeze! In the video, we'll show you how the new Playwright method works in practice and why it makes end-to-end testing and synthetic monitoring so much easier.

What is an API Gateway

When people bemoan the complexity of interconnected IT environments, they usually mean that an organization has a lot of applications that all share data with each other. As your organization adds more applications, you need to make sure that they securely share data with each other. In short, security and development teams find themselves working to deploy and protect the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that enable applications to talk to each other.

The Ultimate Guide to API Monitoring in 2024 - Metrics, Tools, and Proven Practices

According to Akamai, 83% of web traffic is through APIs. Microservices, servers, and clients constantly communicate to exchange information. Even the Google search you made to reach this article involved your browser client calling Google APIs. Given APIs govern the internet, businesses rely on them heavily. API health is directly proportional to business prosperity. This article covers everything about API monitoring, so your API infrastructure’s health is always in check ✅.

Beyond APM: What Datadog Won't Tell You with Leon Adato of Kentik

APM tools promise a unified observability platform, yet they inherently focus on internal metrics, traces, and logs. This internal focus, while valuable, misses critical dimensions of the user experience and network performance that are essential for a complete understanding of application behavior in real-world scenarios. With Kentik you can dive deep into your network performance and find problems before they affect your users.
Sponsored Post

How to improve INP (the newest Core Web Vital)

From the first introduction of Core Web Vitals, Google has maintained that these user experience metrics will keep evolving. Since 2022, the Google team has been testing Interaction to Next Paint (INP), a new interactivity metric, and asking for feedback from the development community. Late in 2023, they announced that INP would replace FID as a Core Web Vital. The transition to INP is effective from March 2024.

How to detect, test and monitor your Next.js API endpoints with the Checkly CLI

In this video, we explore how to use the Checkly CLI to programmatically test and monitor Next.js API endpoints. We'll create a dynamic setup that detects new API GET URLs and use GitHub actions to test preview API deployments and deploy API monitoring after production deploys.