How Consensys Implemented a Systemic Approach to External Monitoring With Checkly

Consensys is the leading blockchain and web3 software company. Since 2014, Consensys has been at the forefront of innovation, pioneering technological developments within the web3 ecosystem.  Through its product suite, including the MetaMask platform, Infura, Linea, Diligence, and our NFT toolkit Phosphor, Consensys has become the trusted collaborator for users, creators, and developers.

Back in 2016, Consensys operated similarly to a startup incubator, housing many distinct teams. Each team was granted the autonomy to select their preferred monitoring tools. As a result, a variety of tools were employed across the teams, which proved to be a complex challenge.

The solution: Build their own observability infrastructure and adopt Checkly as the platform for synthetic monitoring. Find out why. 

The Problem

Managing Everything as Code Fits Perfectly

Consensys started with many different teams, and each team had permission to use any monitoring tool they wanted. Different teams used different tools, including Pingdom, Datadog, the Prometheus Blackbox Exporter, and others. 

However, this was challenging to maintain. First of all, using such a variety of tools was very difficult to manage and started affecting productivity. Moreover, the use of different tools was quite costly. To become more efficient and cost-effective, they had to adopt the same tooling across all teams. 

Initially, an engineer from Consensys discovered Checkly and decided to conduct a pilot test, intrigued by Checkly’s Monitoring as Code approach. The test yielded excellent results, gaining widespread approval from all the engineers. As the team loved Checkly, they decided to combine its synthetic monitoring capabilities with the observability infrastructure they were building internally to replace a million-dollar observability contract.

With Checkly at its core, they began to extensively develop their tooling, leveraging its capabilities to enhance their systems further.

“We really like Checkly because of the Monitoring as Code approach. We manage everything as code and it fits very well into our framework.”

Ohad Noam

SRE Executive Director at Consensys

The Solution

Monitoring Made Easy for All Teams

As some of the teams at Consensys started using their self-hosted observability solution combined with Checkly for synthetic monitoring, they decided to adopt this approach across all teams and migrate from all other tools they were previously using. 

Now, Consensys has a Site Reliability Engineering division that consists of four different teams: Network Operations Center, Embedded SREs, Platform Engineering, and Security Operations Center. The Network Operations Center is responsible for maintaining all the monitors with Checkly, which is also used by the Embedded SREs and the Platform Engineers as well as DevOps, developers and QA engineers from the product teams. 

This migration results in improved efficiency and performance for all site reliability engineering teams led by Noam. Their observability stack is currently fully based on open-source tools, which works very well for them. The team is self-managing Loki, Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, and Grafana Tempo, while Checkly is the platform for synthetic monitoring. 

Spending 40% Less With Checkly 

After adopting Checkly, the biggest benefit for Noam’s team was the ability to set up and maintain monitors as code. Checkly is simple and straightforward, and the Network Operations Center manages it quite easily. 

Moreover, Consensys believes that Checkly’s model of usage-based pricing works well for them. Migrating to Checkly for synthetic monitoring saves Consensys 40% off their monitoring bill.

“I like the ability to segregate between the different products and services and give them different levels of access or different accounts, segregated accounts for every team, and we can mostly automate most of it,” says Ohad Noam, SRE Executive Director at Consensys. 

Finally, the team is very happy with the service they get from Checkly.

“When we have an issue or when we need a new feature or a change, there is good collaboration, and Checkly’s team is open to feedback," adds Noam.

Consensys Is Monitoring More Than Ever

After numerous teams adopted Checkly, the entire company followed suit. The fact that they can now manage their external monitors as code results in a more systemic approach to externally monitoring all of their services. Checkly’s flexibility allowed the teams to start monitoring services that weren’t monitored before. 

"Checkly works well and it’s cost-effective. It’s developer-friendly, which is what brought us to try it in the first place."

Ohad Noam

SRE Executive Director

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