Monitoring from Private Locations

Not everything worth monitoring is on the public internet. In this 30-minute hands-on session, Daniel Paulus deploys four Checkly private location agents on AWS EKS with Terraform, then uses a coding agent to scaffold 200 internal checks in seconds — uptime, TCP, DNS, ICMP, and Playwright browser checks against legacy apps that never leave the firewall.

0:00 Intro and what Checkly is

2:08 Why private locations: services behind firewalls, VPCs, and VPNs

3:00 Infrastructure setup: AWS EKS + Terraform + Checkly providers

3:49 Four agents deployed: uptime-only vs. full image, US and EU

5:43 Why private locations pair well with Kubernetes

6:18 Private locations live in the Checkly UI

6:40 Observing the agents themselves with Prometheus + Grafana

7:46 Demo: scaffolding uptime checks for 100 dummy services with a coding agent

9:33 Agent finds an existing project — and tries to cheat

11:36 Creating the Checkly config from scratch with the agent

12:15 Dry-run before deploy

13:33 200 checks running on internal services

15:06 Iterating: dropping the run frequency to 10 seconds via prompt

16:21 Restructuring round-robin into per-location check groups

18:23 200 checks deployed across two private locations in seconds

19:28 Switching to TCP, DNS, and ICMP for legacy services

21:03 ICMP monitor catches an internal host going down

22:24 CoreDNS monitoring for resolution latency and failures

23:37 TCP check uncovers a real application-layer bug

26:50 Browser checks: Playwright on internal apps that never touch the public internet

28:13 Monitoring the ACDC fan job — a legacy app on a standalone EC2

29:08 Recap: monitoring infrastructure that's literally not reachable any other way

29:28 Q&A: HTTP proxy and corporate certificate support

30:06 Q&A: Which check types run on private locations?

30:45 Q&A: Does this work outside AWS?

31:29 Outro

Checkly: https://www.checklyhq.com/
Private Locations docs: https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/platform/private-locations/overview/
Monitoring as Code: https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/monitoring-as-code/
Checkly Terraform provider: https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/integrations/terraform/
Prometheus integration: https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/integrations/prometheus/
Checkly skills: https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/cli/skills/

#checkly #monitoring #privatelocations #kubernetes #terraform #playwright #devops #sre #monitoringascode