We recently optimized the hell out of our Lighthouse score, and one of our landing pages went from a low 70s score to a cool 96 and above score. Below I describe what started as a quick lunch break peek into the Google Search Console. I recognized that our 'Pingdom alternative' landing page ranks surprisingly well with nearly no investment. BUT the competition was ranking even better. So, why? Common knowledge is that Google-Search is using hundreds of ranking factors.

Managing large numbers of checks by hand quickly becomes cumbersome. Luckily, Checkly's REST API allows us to automate most of the repetitive steps. Building on that API, the Checkly Terraform Provider takes automation one step further, enabling users to specify their active monitoring setup as code. In this article, we will be building on top of John Arundel's great intro from a few months back and showing how to manage multiple checks using groups and shared code snippets.

We are really excited to announce that you can now use Playwright in your browser checks. If you didn't know yet, Playwright is Microsoft's headless browser library. It's very similar to Puppeteer. In fact, it was built by the original creators of Puppeteer and has mostly the same features and a remarkably similar API. This was in our public roadmap and cooking for some time now and we're glad to have it out the door!

After weeks of writing, researching and hopefully enough proofreading, we just launched a living collection of practical guides on leveraging headless browser tools (starting with Puppeteer and Playwright) for testing, monitoring, scraping, performance measuring and more. We called it theheadless.dev. This article is about the different approaches we tried in contributing ideas to the Puppeteer community, as well as the principles that guide our latest contribution.

We just updated our SSL certificate expiration alerting. This update gives you more control over where and when you want to receive these alerts. Before today, certificate alerts were set as part of "Alert Settings" tab, either globally or using specific settings for checks & check groups. This wasn't all that flexible and more granular control was already on our public roadmap.

Here is an overview of the features & fixes we released over the last ~2 months.

If you follow our very own @HLENKE, you might have seen his recent tweet. Availability and responsiveness are key topics for every SaaS platform. They also happen to be multi-level, complex topics that often span different technology stacks and can be tackled with a variety of approaches. Hannes' tweet actually gives us the perfect segue into a blog post about how our engineering team currently monitors Checkly.

Exciting times ahead. With the Jamstack gaining momentum, the landscape around it is offering more and more tools to streamline developer workflows and free up time for actual development. A cutting edge solution in this interesting space is Vercel, formerly known as ZEIT. In this blog post we will get a taste of Vercel's capabilities by using it to deploy and preview a sample Gatsby blog - and while we're at it, we will of course take the chance to kick off some checks automatically from Checkly.

Here is an overview of the features & fixes we released over the last month.

We are thrilled to announce that we have just raised a $2.25M seed round. This round is led by Accel and some great founders — including current and former executives from Vercel (formerly Zeit), Instana, Twilio and many more. Welcome, on board! Active monitoring and end-to-end testing have been silos with different tools and platforms. Modern DevOps demands a change. We firmly believe that Checkly sits at the intersection of these distinct market trends.