Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Test automation has a variety of advantages, and in this post you'll see how it can streamline software development.

Last Saturday, our API went down. Not even a funny error message or slightly slower responses either, it just completely vanished off the internet for 18 minutes. I'm not normally one to point fingers at my hosting provider when things go wrong (since ultimately, I chose to use them, so it's my problem to fix), but when fly.io publicly posts on their forums about their reliability issues, I may as well link to them.

Preview environments are temporary environments where developers can test code changes before deploying them to production, also called ephemeral environments, they’re temporary and should be discarded after testing changes. Carrying out tests using accurate data is a major challenge when creating and destroying environments. Put differently, you need realistic data and traffic in the preview environment to reflect the performance of code changes in production.

In August 2022, Checkly's security team successfully implemented and documented all necessary security controls to be SOC 2 compliant for the first time. To get our SOC 2 Type 1 report we had to prove that our engineering, HR, operational, and IT security processes met the high level of information security SOC 2 compliance demands to an accredited auditing firm.

Late last year we announced improvements to our public dashboards that included a revamped dashboard design that allowed users to see monitoring data in a more easily-digestible way, on any device. We improved performance across the board, and also introduced new incident management functionality—available for paid plans only—that allows users to more easily communicate scheduled maintenance notices and alert developers to minor and major incidents.

Back in October of 2022 we unveiled the beta of @playwright/test. We’re now happy to announce that Playwright Test (PWT) is now generally available! We’ve worked hard to make Checkly the best way to run your Playwright tests, and we’ve also decided to make Playwright—which is experiencing a surge in usage and popularity— the default and recommended web testing framework to use with Checkly.