Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We just released a fresh new view of the sidebar in the Checkly app. This decision was made after some extensive user research—and this is the story of how we got to the final solution.

If you’re leading a technical organization, you’ll have a critical question when you want to perform uptime monitoring: should wse build and run an uptime monitor ourselves, or pay for a service? While it’s totally possible to build your own basic uptime monitor, you’ll end up costing your business more.

A well-crafted status page helps you build trust, reduce support tickets, and keep stakeholders informed in real time. But with so many tools available, which one should you choose? We’ve rounded up the top 10 status page tools — from legacy platforms to modern, dev-first options. Let’s dive in!

We're thrilled to announce that Checkly is now a launch partner in Vercel's Observability Marketplace! This integration makes it easier than ever for Vercel users to monitor their deployments with end-to-end testing and API monitoring powered by Checkly.

Checkly has always been your early warning system—giving engineering teams unmatched speed and precision in detecting problems through powerful synthetic monitoring. When systems fail, communicating clearly and quickly is just as important as fixing the issue itself. Downtime is inevitable. Confusion doesn’t have to be.

If you're using Playwright for end-to-end testing or synthetic monitoring with Checkly, you've likely considered reusing your test code across different test cases. A common approach for this is using Page Object Models (POMs). However, if you're like me, you might have mixed feelings about POMs—while they help organize your code, they can sometimes feel cumbersome to set up and maintain.

With Render’s announcement this week of their new webhook integrations triggered by Render events, I wanted to explore how the integration between Render and Checkly can help ensure more reliable production services for your users. Render is a cloud application platform that enables developers to deploy and scale their apps without needing to manage infrastructure.

For B2B SaaS companies, downtime isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a direct threat to customer satisfaction and revenue. Unlike consumer applications, they serve a mix of power users pushing the system to its limits and new users expecting a seamless experience from day one. Reliability isn’t just about keeping services online—it’s about ensuring every user interaction runs smoothly. A minor hiccup for one customer might be a major disruption for another.

Playwright isn’t a testing framework. Sure it’s got assertions, scripted behaviors, even controls over environments. But testing isn’t Playwright’s only purpose. Playwright is an automation tool. It can carry out any browser-based action consistently, and carry out instructions robustly. Locators for buttons and other elements aren’t visual or CSS class-based, but based on ARIA role, and even small styling changes won’t make the scripted action fail.

Frequently in support conversations and posts on Playwright forums, a problem has come up that’s a little bit hard to describe, but comes down to synchronous testing: developers writing a series of Playwright tests that operate on the assumption that one of the tests will either run first or run last, and perform the function of a setup and cleanup script.