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.
