When we’re testing our apps, it's a big headache to simulate what the user goes through while steering clear of the more problematic parts of those processes. These parts, often external and beyond our control and responsibility, are usually not the focus of our testing. Think external services, third-party modules, or APIs. Relying on these unpredictable elements for our tests is a no-go. Nor do we want to rework our tests to check internal implementations just to dodge these issues.

This is the fourth part of our 12-day Advent of Monitoring series. In this series, Checkly's engineers will share practical monitoring tips from their own experience. One challenge in conducting end-to-end (E2E) testing is managing the artifacts created during the process. These artifacts are necessary for asserting specific functionalities.

This is the third part of our 12-day Advent of Monitoring series. In this series, Checkly's engineers will share practical monitoring tips from their own experience. When it comes to running self-hosted services or side projects, monitoring is key. But, who has the time to set up a complex monitoring system? We want to deliver cool software and not be busy with configuring Prometheus servers or Grafana Dashboards.

Table of contents This is the second part of our 12-day Advent of Monitoring series. In this series, Checkly's engineers will share practical monitoring tips from their own experience. We encountered a tricky issue with our public dashboards: they were experiencing sporadic outages, happening about once every two days. The infrequency and unpredictability of these outages made them particularly challenging to diagnose.

This is the first part of our 12-day Advent of Monitoring series. In this series, Checkly's engineers will share practical monitoring tips from their own experience. Hey there! Here is my take on what synthetic monitoring means and why it’s awesome! I think it’s a very complicated word for a very straightforward concept. In fact, I am convinced, that once you've used it, you will never want to live without it.

We're excited to share that Checkly has been named a 2023 Winter Intellyx Digital Innovator. This recognition resonates deeply with our Monitoring as Code (MaC) workflow and the values we uphold in delivering Checkly to cloud-native engineers, solving uptime and reliability challenges to ship with confidence.

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.