The cloud changed how businesses work, making things more flexible and adaptable. But keeping track of app performance from a user’s point of view in this new setup is tough. Legacy tools tend to not give developers an understanding of their users' perspective. That's where synthetic monitoring comes in. It's a strong way to focus on users and fix the problems that legacy tools miss.
Table of contents Frankly, end-to-end testing and synthetic monitoring are challenging in today’s JavaScript-heavy world. There’s so much asynchronous JavaScript code running in modern applications that getting tests stable can be a real headscratcher. That’s why many teams rely on testing mission-critical features and treat “testing the rest” as a nice to have. It’s a typical cost-effort decision.
If you’re into monitoring, Prometheus is probably an essential part of your stack. Thanks to its expressive query language (PromQL), scalability, and configurable data format, it remains one of the most popular tools for data collection. Paired with Prometheus exporters, the tool can adapt to a variety of surroundings, which is one of its strongest points.
A spicy article hit my inbox the other day. It came with a bold claim — “API testing is better than UI testing”. Absolutes like “A is better than B” rarely hold in the software world. “It depends” is the answer to most tech questions for a reason. Let’s compare API and UI testing and discuss why one isn’t better than the other. The frenemies are “just different”, and always will be. And that’s a good thing.
Today’s a big day at Checkly; we’re thrilled to announce that next to Browser and API checks we released a brand new check type to monitor your apps — say “Hello” to Heartbeat checks! In the realm of software, ensuring uninterrupted functionality is critical. While synthetic monitoring helps you discover user-facing problems early, keeping a close eye on the signals coming from your backend can be just as vital.
When we launched the Checkly CLI and Test Sessions last May, I wrote about the three pillars of monitoring as code. Code — write your monitoring checks as code and store them in version control. Test — test your checks against our global infrastructure and record test sessions. Deploy — deploy your checks from your local machine or CI to run them as monitors.
With Infrastructure as Code and service-oriented development, a modern web app can consist of countless moving parts developed by multiple development and DevOps teams. When establishing a high-velocity development environment, the main question is, "How can you guarantee a stellar end-user experience when lots of engineers are constantly pushing and deploying code?" Solid, easy-to-write, and clearly defined monitoring practices are the only answer to this question.
