This is the sixth part of our 12-day Advent of Monitoring series. In this series, Checkly's engineers will share practical monitoring tips from their own experience.
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.
Here are some use cases where we use Checkly:
API Monitoring
Practice what you preach! We want to make sure our APIs are available, functional, and fast all around the world for all of our customers. This involves private and public API endpoints. We display the state of some of these checks also on our company dashboard status.checklyhq.com, so you can also always take a look at it if you want to.
Security Monitoring
We continuously improve our security and security practices at Checkly. Of course, we need to make sure the things we fix stay fixed. We use our tool to check this frequently. Checkly allows us to use different alerting channels to react immediately in case of a wrong configuration. Of course, these are caught in our staging environment.
Upstream Provider Monitoring
You can never monitor too many things as a monitoring tool. That is the reason why we also monitor a certain subset of our upstream providers. This allows us to be alerted the moment something fails and announce incidents immediately for our customers.
Conclusion
Checkly plays a pivotal role across multiple fronts within our operations: from ensuring the reliability and speed of our APIs globally, fortifying our security practices with vigilant checks and responsive alert systems, to monitoring upstream providers for preemptive issue resolution and prompt customer communication.
The commitment to employing Checkly extensively underscores its practical applicability and resilience. By integrating it into critical facets of our operations, we not only validate its efficacy but also contribute to its continual improvement. This approach not only showcases its reliability but also ensures that Checkly remains a dependable ally in navigating the complex landscape of technological solutions, reinforcing its position as a robust and adaptive monitoring tool.