Recently, I stumbled upon an eye-opening NPR podcast that delved into the lingering use of pagers in healthcare—a seemingly outdated technology that continues to drive communication in hospitals. As I listened through the debate around its persistence, discussing challenges and unexpected benefits, it prompted reflections on facilitating a seamless shift to secure phone-app-based texting, acknowledging the considerable advantages it brings.

The two key pillars of building reliable applications are: testing and monitoring. With testing, you can verify that each pull request works before it’s merged and deployed to production. Just testing isn’t enough, though. You also need to make sure that the application continues to work on production. Database rollovers, third-party outages, and unexpected spikes in traffic can all cause issues that need to be detected.

This is the fourth part of our 12-day Advent of Monitoring series. In this series, Checkly's engineers will share practical monitoring tips from their own experience. One challenge in conducting end-to-end (E2E) testing is managing the artifacts created during the process. These artifacts are necessary for asserting specific functionalities.