Observability isn't just a buzzword; it's a vital compass guiding us through the maze of system health and performance. As we’ve adopted microservice architectures, the ability to know ‘what is currently happening in our system’ has diminished as our operational resilience has increased. We find services scattered among a maze of interconnections and interdependencies. And even the logs that used to guide are now scattered throughout this maze.

I’m pretty sure that you’ve had a situation where you deployed a major UX change on your web app and missed the most obvious issues, like a misaligned button or distorted images. Unintended changes on your site can cause not only a sharp decline in user satisfaction but also a large fall in sales and customer retention. By identifying and resolving these discrepancies before the update went live, you could have prevented these outcomes.

Open banking offers users a way to have easier access to their own bank account information, like via third-party applications. This is achieved by allowing third-party financial service providers access to the financial data of a bank's customers through the use of APIs, which enable secure communication between the different parties involved.

I'm happy to announce that visual regression & snapshot testing for our Playwright powered browser checks is now GA. If you have used these capabilities with your Playwright tests on your local machine or in your CI/CD pipeline, you can now use them 1:1 on Checkly.

Everyone needs observability. If you have a service that users rely on, you need to know if it’s working for your users. Heartbeat monitoring (Also called Synthetic Monitoring) should be a way to truly know how well our site is performing for users.

Synthetic monitoring is a proactive approach that actively tests websites or apps, either scheduled or on demand, using automated testing scripts, ensuring that any issues are identified and resolved before they impact real users. This approach provides continuous oversight of the online presence, akin to having a vigilant eye on the website 24/7. In this article, we’re discussing synthetic monitoring, putting the accent on using browsers.

How much do Synthetics matter to your team? I think they matter a whole lot. Back when I was a freelance developer, I doubled my annual income with synthetics. Working mainly in database optimizations, I would finish out a contract and leave a synthetic monitor running at a very low frequency on their service. When I saw a pattern of slower performance, I knew it was time to hit the team lead-up to ask if I could help.

This is the last part of our 12-day Advent of Monitoring series. In this series, Checkly's engineers will share practical monitoring tips from their own experience. At Checkly, the commitment to reliability is not just a tagline; it's embedded in our DNA. As software engineers, we understand the critical importance of dogfooding—using our own product to ensure its robustness and effectiveness. This approach holds immense value, especially since Checkly is designed for observability.

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.

Cloud-based database providers often provide great observability out of the box. But, what if you’re developing a tricky feature locally and need more details about what your local Clickhouse is doing? There are many options, but if you’re a numbers and graphs person like me, you’ll want to be able to view the inner workings of Clickhouse in something like Grafana.