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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.
When used contextually with synthetic checks, combined with Playwright in a Monitoring as Code environment, Traces are extremely powerful. They help engineers contextualize and understand what happened in the backend when their code was in execution, and a failure or increased response time happened, quickly pointing to the culprit.
Why We Built Checkly Traces
In highly distributed systems, understanding why a check failed often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. Engineers spend countless hours piecing together logs from multiple services, wrestling with sampling strategies, and managing ever-growing volumes of telemetry data. This complexity leads to increased Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), impacting both system reliability and user experience.
We built Checkly Traces to solve these challenges. By connecting your OpenTelemetry spans directly with your Browser and API synthetic checks, we provide immediate visibility into what's breaking or slowing down when a check fails or degrades.
Here is an example of how a check result page looks with and without Traces:
Accelerating Time to Resolution
Checkly Traces dramatically reduces MTTR by providing:
- Instant correlation between failing monitors and their underlying traces
- Clear visibility into each step of a request's journey
- Focused, actionable insights without data noise
- Immediate full-stack visibility into every error
This means your team spends less time investigating issues and more time building features that matter to your users.
Key Aspects of Checkly Traces
1. Direct Correlation Between Monitors and Traces
Gone are the days of manually correlating failing monitors with backend traces. Checkly Traces automatically links synthetic checks to their underlying traces, providing a clear path to the root cause of errors. When a check fails, you'll know exactly which API call timed out and what steps led to the failure.
2. Optimized Performance and Cost Control
Unlike traditional observability platforms that capture everything and leave you to figure out sampling strategies, Checkly Traces focuses solely on the spans tied to your checks. This targeted approach means you get all the critical data you need without the burden of storing unnecessary information, significantly reducing your storage costs and data complexity.
3. Complete Performance Overview Without Noise
By capturing every request tied to your checks, Checkly Traces ensures no critical data is missed while maintaining a clean, focused view of your system's performance. This balance between comprehensive coverage and signal-to-noise ratio helps teams identify and resolve issues more efficiently.
4. Native OpenTelemetry Support
We've built Checkly Traces on OpenTelemetry, the industry standard for instrumentation. This means you can auto-instrument your code using OpenTelemetry SDKs and APIs without vendor lock-in, maintaining flexibility to integrate with modern observability ecosystems.
5. End-to-End Visibility
Checkly Traces moves beyond black-box testing by providing detailed visibility into your application's behavior during synthetic checks. With contextual spans showing every step of a request's journey, you get a clear, actionable view of your system's performance from frontend to backend.
Useful Links
Checkly Traces is available today for all Checkly customers. To get started & get more details:
What's Next
This launch marks just the beginning of our journey to simplify observability for development teams. We're committed to expanding Checkly Traces' capabilities while maintaining its focus on developer productivity, reduced MTTR, and cost-effectiveness.
Ready to experience the power of unified synthetic monitoring and distributed tracing? Sign up for Checkly today and see how Checkly Traces can reduce your time to resolution.