When we’re testing our apps, it's a big headache to simulate what the user goes through while steering clear of the more problematic parts of those processes. These parts, often external and beyond our control and responsibility, are usually not the focus of our testing. Think external services, third-party modules, or APIs. Relying on these unpredictable elements for our tests is a no-go. Nor do we want to rework our tests to check internal implementations just to dodge these issues.

Google Workspace is a robust set of productivity applications with billions of users and millions of paying organizations. These include small mom-and-pop shops and the largest enterprises. Google provides the Google Reports API, “a RESTful API you can use to access information about the Google Workspace activities of your users.” This data is critical for establishing a solid security posture.

Table of contents As a golden rule of building a developer tool, you should always dog-food your own product. But, how does this work with a monitoring solution 🤔? Doesn’t it create a chicken and egg problem? Checkly uses multiple tools to monitor the platform, and tools from our competitors as well. However, we still dogfood our platform heavily. I believe this is mainly due to our engineers also liking the product and finding it quite easy to monitor their features.

Five years ago today, Grafana Loki was introduced to the world on the KubeconNA 2018 stage when David Kaltschmidt, now a Senior Director of Engineering at Grafana Labs, clicked the button to make the Loki repo public live in front of the sold-out crowd. At the time, Loki was a prototype: We bolted together Grafana as a UI, Cortex internals, and Prometheus labels to find out if there was a need for a new open source tool to manage logs.