Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This is a guest post by Vince Graics, Staff QA Engineer at World of Books. If you're running a Shopify storefront and want reliable synthetic monitoring, you'll hit a wall. Shopify's bot detection doesn't care that your headless browser is friendly; it sees datacenter IPs and acts accordingly. Cart API calls get hit with 429 rate limits, Cloudflare challenge pages pop up mid-check, and you're left wondering whether the bug is in your code or in the platform fighting you.

Regular DR testing is no longer a compliance checkbox — it is a critical engineering discipline that determines whether an organisation can survive a real cloud outage with its services and revenue intact. As the AWS Middle East incident demonstrated, regional cloud failures can strike without warning and defeat standard redundancy models, making untested DR plans dangerously unreliable.

I worked in observability for years, and the same pattern showed up across teams. An alert fired, the on-call rotation scrambled, and everyone did what they had to do to stabilize production. Then came the retrospective. Once the immediate pressure was gone, the conversation shifted to one question: how do we make sure this never happens again? My friend Jade Rubick coined a name for that principle: DRI, “don’t repeat the incident”.

The Checkly Playwright Reporter is an npm package that sends the results of npx playwright test to Checkly as a cloud test session, including traces, screenshots, videos, and full debugging context. Run your Playwright suite in CI or locally, and every result gets a persistent, shareable home in Checkly with AI-powered analysis, richer trace-derived views, and a direct path to production monitoring. It does not replace Playwright. It makes the output of Playwright much easier to work with.

This comprehensive guide covers the fundamentals of load testing, key differences from stress and performance testing, step-by-step execution methods, popular tools, and best practices to help teams build resilient systems with confidence. In today's always-on digital economy, a single slow page or unexpected crash during peak traffic can cost businesses thousands or even millions of dollars in lost revenue, damaged reputation, and frustrated customers.

‍Flaky tests are automated tests that pass or fail inconsistently without changes to the code. In this guide, you’ll learn why flaky tests happen, how to detect them automatically in CI pipelines, and how modern platforms prevent them from slowing teams down. Your test went well three times yesterday. It didn't work this morning. You ran it again without changing anything, and now it works. Congratulations, you've just passed a flaky test, and now someone's day is going to be ruined.