Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2024

Using Visual Regression checks to Make Sure You Never Miss a Problem on Production

This webinar introduces an approach to visual regression monitoring, utilizing Playwright and Checkly. Playwright, an open-source end-to-end testing framework supported by Microsoft, enables you to simulate complex paths through your site. Checkly, which uses playwright to create synthetic service monitors, enables the execution of visual regression tests at regular intervals. This combination alerts developers to potential interface problems before they become visible to users.

Why use a status page API and best alternatives

In the digital age, transparency and communication are key to customer satisfaction and operational efficiency, especially during downtime or degraded performance. This is where the importance of a status page comes into play, helping organizations effectively automate these communications, particularly through the use of status page APIs.

How to narrow and chain your Playwright locators

Locating elements in your end-to-end tests can sometimes be a challenge. In this video, we tackle the problem of hard-to-locate elements by chaining multiple locators using `locator().and()`. By chaining locators you'll be able to combine user-first locators with specific locators reaching for a test id or CSS class.

Building Modern REST APIs with OpenAPI

No, I'm not talking about 'OpenAI', though you certainly can use it to assist in your API designs. I'm talking about the OpenAPI standard, a modern spec for defining REST APIs. If you're reading this, I probably don't need to tell you that REST APIs are ubiquitous in tech. Practically every company has at least one, whether it be an internal or customer facing API. While other types of APIs have been gaining traction the last few years (GraphQL, gRPC, etc), REST is here to stay.

Lessons learned from running a large gRPC mesh at Datadog

Datadog’s infrastructure comprises hundreds of distributed services, which are constantly discovering other services to network with, exchanging data, streaming events, triggering actions, coordinating distributed transactions involving multiple services, and more. Implementing a networking solution for such a large, complex application comes with its own set of challenges, including scalability, load balancing, fault tolerance, compatibility, and latency.

Now in the API: Website monitor configurations

As you may know, StatusGator has two monitor types at present: Cloud service monitors and website monitors. Our website monitor feature allows a myriad of sophisticated configuration options including interval config, HTTP methods, and content or status checks. We’ve just launched some important improvements to our API for those of you using website monitors. Our Service show endpoint will now include configuration details for those monitors that are website monitors under a new key called config.

Checkly adds deep synthetic monitoring to Coralogix with new integration

Starting today, Checkly users can send their traces from synthetics checks to Coralogix to view in-depth synthetic user data along with back-end APM based tracing. This gives SRE’s and Operations engineers a new insight into how the system is responding to automated synthetic tests of your service. For Checkly users, integrating with Coralogix data means it’s easy to correlate end-to-end user experience with backend performance, and track poor performance to its root cause.

How to test and monitor your APIs with Playwright

In today's video, we explore a lesser-known feature of Microsoft's Playwright - API Testing. We'll illustrate how to use Playwright for testing GraphQL as an example of an HTTP-based API; RESTful APIs can be tested too. We'll explain the usage of the 'request' fixture with Playwright, parse responses and validate their correctness. Moreover, we'll delve into executing multiple API requests in a single Playwright test case while testing their responses.

How to Fight Alert Fatigue with Synthetic Monitoring: 7 Best Practices

It’s 1am, and something has gone very wrong. The head of sales is in the incident response channel because our top customer is reporting a system-wide outage. Everyone’s running around trying to figure it out. As you look at service maps and traces, you get a sinking feeling. Earlier the previous evening, you got an alert that user-access-service was running out of memory.

Alberto Gomez joins as CPO of Checkly and Tim Nolet will become Chief Evangelist

Today, I’m thrilled to announce two changes to our leadership team. We at Checkly aim to deliver the best synthetic monitoring platform that allows you to identify and resolve issues 10x faster. I’m proud to have crossed that 1,000-customer mark and aim to enhance your experience even further as we are just getting started and are excited about what technologies like Open Telemetry, Clickhouse and others will enable us to do in the future.

And What About my User Experience?

Monitoring backend signals has been standard practice for years, and tech companies have been alerting their SRE and software engineers when API endpoints are failing. But when you’re alerted about a backend issue, it’s often your end users who are directly affected. Shouldn’t we observe and alert on this user experience issues early on? As frontend monitoring is a newer practice, companies often struggle to identify signals that can help them pinpoint user frustrations or performance problems.

Monitor Complex User Flows With Checkly's Multistep Checks

With an ever-growing market of digital products, it is becoming increasingly important for every business to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction. In the past, companies might have been able to get away with slow or messy websites. Today, if a customer gets frustrated even once, they will likely abandon your product in search of a better replacement.

Monitor Complex User Flows with Checkly's Multistep Checks

Learn how Checkly's new multistep checks help you to decrease incident response times with synthetic monitoring. Use multistep checks to chain and manage multiple API requests, run custom code for response validation, and get accurate alerts when incidents occur. This video explains how to create a multistep check to monitor a RESTful API from scratch. Do you have questions? Join our vibrant Checkly community on Slack and explore further!

How IT administrators can streamline operations using the LogicMonitor API

In today’s fast-paced IT ecosystem, agility and efficiency are not just goals but necessities. So why waste an hour (or more) manually onboarding individual devices when you can leverage the LogicMonitor API to automate the onboarding process for an entire site in just minutes from a simple CSV file? In this article, we’re going to review how LogicMonitor administrators can maximize efficiency and transform their IT operations using LogicMonitor’s REST API and Powershell.

The Ultimate Guide to Performance Regression Testing

Regression testing is not a new concept. However, historically, it has been limited to functional testing due to the setup, configuration, and maintenance required to simulate a production environment accurately. Many teams have found the cost outweighs the benefits, but with the advent of production traffic replication (PTR), it’s become a viable option to regression test performance, especially for those running applications in Kubernetes.

Our Check Overview Page Has a Fresh New Look

We are very excited to announce that we redesigned our monitoring results chart to make it easier for you to understand check performance over time and easily investigate any past anomaly. The redesign is a result of our UX research that showed that the old check overview chart made it challenging for users to find check results from the past. While we were redesigning our monitoring results charts, we wanted to achieve two things: And, we achieved this in three attempts. Let’s dive in.

An SRE's Most Important Skill? Communication

I wish someone had told me that I shouldn’t hop between frameworks. Just like learning four programming languages in your first year, in my experience spending time content switching as a beginner is wasted effort. If I’d spent a solid year learning how to deploy services on AWS, then when it was time to learn Azure, I’d see more similarities than differences and find it a lot easier to pick up a second public cloud.

How to combine POMs (Page Object Models) with Playwright Fixtures for better developer experience

Page object models (POM) are common to encapsulate test automation logic and improve code readability. Learn in this video how to combine POMs and Playwright fixtures for effective end-to-end testing and synthetic monitoring with an excellent developer experience. Got questions? Join the Checkly community Slack. And tune in next week for more on Playwright, Synthetic Monitoring, and API Monitoring. Happy testing!