Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you're using Playwright for end-to-end testing or synthetic monitoring with Checkly, you've likely considered reusing your test code across different test cases. A common approach for this is using Page Object Models (POMs). However, if you're like me, you might have mixed feelings about POMs—while they help organize your code, they can sometimes feel cumbersome to set up and maintain.

With Render’s announcement this week of their new webhook integrations triggered by Render events, I wanted to explore how the integration between Render and Checkly can help ensure more reliable production services for your users. Render is a cloud application platform that enables developers to deploy and scale their apps without needing to manage infrastructure.

For B2B SaaS companies, downtime isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a direct threat to customer satisfaction and revenue. Unlike consumer applications, they serve a mix of power users pushing the system to its limits and new users expecting a seamless experience from day one. Reliability isn’t just about keeping services online—it’s about ensuring every user interaction runs smoothly. A minor hiccup for one customer might be a major disruption for another.

Playwright isn’t a testing framework. Sure it’s got assertions, scripted behaviors, even controls over environments. But testing isn’t Playwright’s only purpose. Playwright is an automation tool. It can carry out any browser-based action consistently, and carry out instructions robustly. Locators for buttons and other elements aren’t visual or CSS class-based, but based on ARIA role, and even small styling changes won’t make the scripted action fail.

Frequently in support conversations and posts on Playwright forums, a problem has come up that’s a little bit hard to describe, but comes down to synchronous testing: developers writing a series of Playwright tests that operate on the assumption that one of the tests will either run first or run last, and perform the function of a setup and cleanup script.

Checkly has always helped you monitor your APIs and web services, ensuring they stay fast, reliable, and available. But application reliability doesn’t stop there—databases, message queues, and mail servers all play a crucial role in your infrastructure. To provide full application reliability, we’re expanding into network monitoring with TCP checks. Now, you can monitor critical non-HTTP services directly in Checkly—without adding extra tools to your stack.

When I joined Checkly as Junior People Operations Manager, one of the benefits that immediately stood out to me was the Learning & Visiting budget. I found myself wondering—how is this budget actually being used across the company? At the start of the year, many of our team members plan how they’ll use their learning budget—whether to enhance professional skills or pursue self-driven projects. With flexible guidelines, we encourage them to invest in what matters most.