How Admiral Reduced Incident Response Time by Over 50% with Checkly

Admiral’s previous monitoring tools were basic and lacked the sophistication needed for their expanding operations. The absence of a comprehensive Monitoring as Code workflow further complicated their efforts to maintain service reliability. James Hartig, who oversees the infrastructure and backend services, described the limitations they faced:

• Basic Functionality: The monitoring tools Admiral used were only capable of performing basic checks, such as determining if an endpoint was up or down. This legacy approach—either everything was fine or there was a problem—did not provide detailed insights into the health and performance of their services. 
• Limited Configurability: The existing solutions Admiral used needed to offer the advanced configurability required for detailed monitoring. This limitation restricted their ability to perform comprehensive checks on their services, making it difficult to ensure all aspects of their systems were functioning correctly.
• Lack of Detailed Insights: Their previous tools' basic endpoint monitoring failed to provide thorough data on service performance and user interactions. This lack of detailed insights made it challenging for the team to diagnose issues effectively and efficiently, often leading to prolonged resolution times.

The need for a more advanced monitoring tool became evident as Admiral sought to enhance their service reliability and operational efficiency. The key requirements for the new tool included:

• Advanced Scripting Capabilities: Admiral needed a tool that could perform detailed and customized checks through advanced scripting. The ability to use Playwright for scripting these checks was particularly appealing, as it allowed them to perform detailed, scenario-specific monitoring using Typescript. 
• Cost-effective Solution: As a small company, Admiral needed a monitoring solution that fit within their budget constraints. They required a tool that offered robust features without being prohibitively expensive, ensuring they could implement comprehensive monitoring without straining their financial resources.
• Seamless Integration: The new monitoring tool needed to integrate seamlessly with Admiral’s existing observability stack, which included Prometheus, OpsGenie, and Grafana. Compatibility with these tools was essential to ensure a smooth transition and continued effective monitoring.

After evaluating their options, Admiral chose Checkly for its Playwright integration for advanced checks, cost-effective pricing, and compatibility with existing tools like OpsGenie and Slack, which allowed seamless incorporation into their workflow.

One of the most notable benefits was the dramatic reduction in incident response time, which led to a quantifiable improvement in operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. The ability to quickly diagnose and address issues was significantly enhanced, leading to faster resolution times.

• Before Checkly: Investigating an incident could take up to 10 minutes. The team had to manually dig into the problem, often requiring significant time and effort to identify the root cause.
• After Checkly: With Checkly, the initial investigation and triage process now takes about 5 minutes or less, a reduction of over 50%. This improvement was due to Checkly’s detailed diagnostic capabilities, which provided immediate insights into the issues.

Moreover, Checkly’s dashboards provided comprehensive details on check failures, including network and console logs, facilitating faster diagnosis and resolution. At the same time, visual regression monitoring enabled the team to maintain the visual integrity of their services. These features were crucial for quickly understanding and resolving issues.

• Visual Regression Monitoring: Checkly’s capabilities also allowed Admiral to check for various visual elements, such as text presence and image loading, even without full visual testing. This feature added an extra layer of assurance in their monitoring process, ensuring that the visual aspects of their services met their standards and contributed to overall service reliability.
• Replays and Logs: The ability to watch recordings and view logs directly within Checkly allowed the team to understand what went wrong and take appropriate action quickly.

Using Checkly enhanced Admiral’s ability to accurately report their SLAs. The detailed checks provided assurance that their services were consistently performing as expected.

The detailed monitoring provided by Checkly ensured that all critical aspects of Admiral's services were functioning correctly. This led to more accurate and reliable SLA reporting, as they could verify the performance of their services with greater precision and detail.

"Checkly was a big component into a big part of that overall SLA calculation that we report on each month. Its detailed checks help ensure we meet our service level agreements, providing our clients with reliable service performance data," explained James Hartig, co-founder of Admiral.