It’s every ops team’s biggest anxiety: a monitoring system detects a failure, but the notification either isn’t delivered or isn’t noticed by the team. Now we have to wait for users to complain before our team knows about the problem. Checkly sends an alert every time the system detects a failure, but how can you be sure you’re getting those alerts, and that those alerts are going to the right people?

Until recently, Checkly was telling you what broke in your app. Now, it can also tell you why it broke. We're excited to announce the general availability of Checkly Traces, a new addition to our synthetic monitoring platform that bridges the gap between frontend monitoring and backend observability. By combining synthetic monitoring with distributed tracing, Checkly Traces empowers development teams to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues faster than ever before.

Checkly is a key part of a professional developer’s workflow, making it easy to know if your service is up or down, and measure performance. As we integrate with almost any development workflow, we also have Prometheus endpoints to let you use the popular Grafana stack to keep track of your site checks’ status. As large enterprise users grew in usage, their check performance data grew in parallel, and our endpoint started returning occasional 429 status codes.

I recently talked to a customer of Checkly and he shared some thoughts about Monitoring as Code. Let’s call him Karl in this article. Karl and I talked about why Monitoring as Code (MaC) is becoming essential for teams operating at scale. As the Head of Platform Engineering at a major e-commerce company processing millions of transactions daily, his experience shows how MaC solves a lot of the messy challenges that come with traditional synthetic monitoring setups.

Several years ago—in 2016, to be exact—we decided to host the Checkly platform on Heroku, since it was the hosted cloud offering (at the time) that best aligned with our needs. In particular, we felt that Heroku offered the best PostgreSQL cloud offering available at the time.