Changelog: Reporting, deployments and many, many enhancements and fixes

Our product & dev team has been cranking out so many small, medium and big updates the last ~2 months, we thought we'd do a comprehensive sum up. Grab some coffee ☕️  and strap yourself in: the list is quite long!

New features

1. Reporting

We launched the beta of Reporting! You can find it under the reporting tab in the left side bar menu. This new feature gives you longer term trends and the ability to export your data as CSV. Read more here.

2. CI/CD & Deployments

Customers using our GitHub, Vercel or command line triggers can run check "on deploy". We are now showing the deployment and the results of the checks triggered by that deployment on a dedicated page.

We will be developing this feature over the coming months to make running checks against staging or test environments easier, quicker and more full featured.

Here is a screenshot of our own overview — yes we dog food Checkly quite a bit! Woof. Give it a spin by going to https://app.checklyhq.com/deployments

3. Osaka region 🇯🇵

今日は to all users in Japan and specifically in the Osaka region! We just added support for Osaka as a run location. This is available now on all plans.

Enhancements

• You can now pass in an environment_url parameter to command line triggers to target staging environments. More info here
• We added the Jest expect library to all our runners as an alternative to the existing Chai.js assertion library.
• You can now access any variable using the Node.js default process.env.VARIABLE notation. This worked already for Browser checks, but also works now in any setup or teardown script you might use for your API checks.
• We added a default user-agent header to our checks. You can still override them, but we were being bad net-citizens by not providing a default. API checks now identify as Checkly/1.0 (https://www.checklyhq.com) whereas Browser checks now go under Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/79.0.3945.0 Safari/537.36 (Checkly, https://www.checklyhq.com)
• We removed Google Analytics completely from our public website and web application.

Bug fixes

• We did a major refactor and bug fix exercise to increase the performance of the home dashboard, mostly for larger customers. Earlier, customers with 100+ checks would experience sluggish behaviour when navigating the home dashboard. Consequently, we also shrank our database roughly 60% to 70% in size. Never a bad thing!
• We now show group-level tags in the various tag selectors. We didn't do that before and we do not really now why.
• We fixed a bug where variables added to an API check's URL did not resolve correctly when that API check was part of a group and used the GROUP_BASE_URL
• Earlier a "wrong" content-type header — for instance application/json when the return body is actually not valid JSON — would show all assertions as failing in the UI. This is silly but is fixed now.
• We fixed some annoying UI bugs in the groups editor: the GROUP_BASE_URL was not available directly for ad hoc runs if you did not save the group yet. Also, duplicating checks in a group would require locations to be set on the check: this would block the UI for no reason. Lastly, editing the name of check in context for a group had a confusing input box that would not make it clear whether the state was saved or not.