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.