Company
Date Published
Author
Daniel Paulus
Word count
476
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

We encountered a tricky issue with our public dashboards, which experienced sporadic outages about once every two days. To simulate this scenario, we used ChatGPT4 to generate a simple nodeJS server that would return a 500 status code with a certain probability. We then configured API checks with Checkly, running one every 5 minutes and another every 10 seconds, to detect these outages. The high-frequency API check proved to be more effective in identifying the issue, revealing almost exactly when it started, stopped, and how long it took. This experience highlighted the importance of synthetic monitoring with higher frequency checks for issues that occur sporadically, allowing us to root cause and fix the dashboard's outages and enhance the reliability of our service.