Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Imagine its Black Friday and your e-commerce platform suddenly stops processing payments. The culprit? A critical API connection to your payment processor has failed, and you had no idea until angry customers started flooding your support channels. By the time your team identifies and fixes the issue, you’ve already lost thousands in potential sales and damaged your brand reputation.

Until recently, Checkly was telling you what broke in your app. Now, it can also tell you why it broke. We're excited to announce the general availability of Checkly Traces, a new addition to our synthetic monitoring platform that bridges the gap between frontend monitoring and backend observability. By combining synthetic monitoring with distributed tracing, Checkly Traces empowers development teams to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues faster than ever before.

APIs are the backbone of modern software, quietly powering everything we interact with. But just because they’re invisible doesn’t mean they can’t run into issues. From response times to uptime, keeping an eye on your APIs is key to making sure everything works smoothly. In this guide, we’ll explore 11 popular API monitoring tools to help you find the one that best fits your needs.

Checkly is a key part of a professional developer’s workflow, making it easy to know if your service is up or down, and measure performance. As we integrate with almost any development workflow, we also have Prometheus endpoints to let you use the popular Grafana stack to keep track of your site checks’ status. As large enterprise users grew in usage, their check performance data grew in parallel, and our endpoint started returning occasional 429 status codes.

Using a mock server is a popular method of working around these limitations and realities, allowing you to test web server assets against specific requests, ensuring that your response data matches the expected outcome. Today, we’re going to look at a powerful solution for Python clients in the form of MockServer. We’ll walk through the tool’s basics and learn how to use it for your own testing.

I recently talked to a customer of Checkly and he shared some thoughts about Monitoring as Code. Let’s call him Karl in this article. Karl and I talked about why Monitoring as Code (MaC) is becoming essential for teams operating at scale. As the Head of Platform Engineering at a major e-commerce company processing millions of transactions daily, his experience shows how MaC solves a lot of the messy challenges that come with traditional synthetic monitoring setups.