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.

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.

IaC? CI? Shift Left? What do they really mean? - A DevOps Glossary

Look, we've all been there: there's a term, you've heard it one hundred times. You've nodded as others said it in meetings. And now, you've started to say it. The only tiny insignificant problem is that you're not 100% sure what it actually means or how it's different from another similar term. I feel you. So I wrote this DevOps glossary with my highly opinionated definitions of common DevOps industry terms.

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.

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 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!

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.