October 2022 Summaries

Checkly is hosting a free online workshop on October 27th, led by Plushcap, to introduce developers to synthetic monitoring and help them write their first checks using the Checkly platform. The workshop will cover topics such as creating checks, alerts, and dashboards, as well as integrating Checkly with existing tools like Terraform and Playwright. Plushcap will also discuss Microsoft's Playwright browser automation tool and its integration with Checkly for monitoring critical user flows. Additionally, the discussion will focus on Checkly's Monitoring-as-Code (MaC) approach, which aims to make software monitoring more useful and effective for developers. The workshop is designed to take participants' software monitoring approaches to the next level and can be registered for by completing a registration form prior to the event.

You can now run checks from your private location and automatically scale the Checkly agents as needed, providing a margin of safety in case other users are creating new checks in that location. The autoscaling configuration uses Prometheus metrics to trigger scaling events, allowing you to control how many replicas are running based on the health of your private location. This provides a flexible solution for managing Checkly agent resources and ensures that your infrastructure can handle changing workloads without becoming overwhelmed.

Checkly has announced the general availability of its GitHub Sync feature, which allows developers to power their Browser checks with their GitHub code and automatically sync it with Checkly. The feature offers two syncing strategies: Sync on Commit and Sync on Deployment, both designed to prevent false-positive alerts due to out-of-sync code. With GitHub Sync, developers can also use local file dependencies, inspect runtime specs, and leverage Checkly Runtimes to avoid running `npm install` for all Browser checks. This GA release is part of a larger set of product features aimed at integrating Checkly seamlessly with the developer workflow, enabling easy development, iteration, and customization of monitoring and E2E testing.

Microsoft's Playwright is more than just a headless browser control, it has an entire testing framework built around its browser automation capabilities. The `@playwright/test` package includes a test runner, assertion library, and other features to ease end-to-end testing. Playwright's test runner is now available in the Checkly runtime 2022.02 as a public beta, allowing users to require it in their Browser checks. This framework offers multiple tests in one file, web-first assertions, and debuggable traces, making it easier to write and maintain tests. These new features are part of Microsoft's Launch Week, where they will be covered over the next few days, including GitHub Sync for managing Browser checks.

Checkly has achieved SOC 2 Type 1 compliance, demonstrating its ongoing commitment to information security and data privacy. This milestone showcases the company's adherence to industry standards for managing customer data, with a focus on security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. As a leading synthetic monitoring platform, Checkly prioritizes security and privacy, ensuring customers have assurance that their data is handled securely and in compliance with best practices. The company plans to continue enhancing its organizational controls, conducting regular security reviews, and pursuing additional security standards as needed to support its growing customer base across various industries.

The Checkly development team has announced several new features and improvements during their first-ever Launch Week, which took place from October 11th to 14th, 2022. On the first day, they introduced improved mobile alerts, a new alert notification log, and a Checkly Slack community. The second day focused on security news, including SOC 2 Type 1 compliance, which demonstrates the company's commitment to privacy and security. The third day announced native support for Playwright Test, allowing customers to run existing scripts directly into Checkly with additional features. Finally, on the fourth day, GitHub Sync became generally available, enabling users to update and control browser check code from a single codebase. Throughout Launch Week, live video chats were held by Stefan Judis and other team members to discuss these new features and capabilities.

The developer is announcing the start of Launch Week, a series of daily releases with new features and improvements for their monitoring and alerting tool, Checkly. The first day focuses on updates to the alerting capabilities, including improved check detail screens and a new alert notification log that allows users to inspect triggered alerts on their phone. This feature aims to reduce false alarms and improve debugging capabilities by tracking all communications with the alerting provider. Additionally, a new Slack community has been launched to connect developers, share knowledge, and build applications together. The developer encourages users to join the community, ask questions, or share their projects and favorite coding music.