How Render Scaled Monitoring and Cut Debugging Time from Days to Minutes with Checkly

Render is a cloud application platform that enables developers to deploy and scale their apps without needing to manage infrastructure. With millions of services running on Render, platform reliability stands as the team's perpetual top priority. To maintain high performance, Render needed a modern, scalable monitoring solution that could integrate seamlessly with their existing tools and workflows.

With Checkly, Render transitioned from less versatile monitoring practices to an automated, trace-enabled observability solution that empowers their teams to detect and resolve issues faster than ever.

The Challenge

Render’s infrastructure handles critical tasks, including HTTP proxying, inter-cluster networking, and customer-facing applications. Their previous monitoring setup presented several challenges.

Limited Usability

At times, engineers spent more time configuring and troubleshooting monitoring tools than resolving actual issues.

Delayed Issue Resolution

Debugging intermittent, rare, and hard-to-catch issues, such as customer-reported latency required extensive manual effort, sometimes taking up to a week to identify root causes.

Detecting Network Misconfigurations

MTTD for network misconfigurations has always been on point for the Render team, but they could benefit from reducing it even further.

Fragmented Workflows

Monitoring was spread across multiple tools, leading to inconsistent configurations, gaps in coverage, and difficulty maintaining visibility across clusters.

“We needed a tool that could do more than just basic uptime checks. We wanted to measure performance, troubleshoot faster, and ensure our systems were always reliable.”

Brian Stack

Infrastructure Engineer

Requirements

Render needed a solution that could address the limitations of their existing setup and meet their growing needs for observability. These are the key requirements they had when they were looking for their new monitoring solution.

Ease of Use and Integration

The solution had to be simple to set up and integrate with Render’s existing tools, such as Terraform for infrastructure automation and Grafana for visualization.

Advanced Monitoring Capabilities

Beyond uptime checks, Render required insights into latency at service boundaries and the ability to diagnose performance issues effectively.

Scalability and Automation

 As Render’s infrastructure spans multiple clusters and service types, the monitoring tool needed to handle large-scale environments and automate check creation.

Collaboration-Friendly Features

Features like tagging, Slack alerts, and SSO were essential to enable cross-team collaboration and empower support teams to manage monitoring independently.

"With Terraform and Checkly, we have pretty comprehensive coverage across clusters and services. It’s easy for us to understand the health of our systems and diagnose and resolve issues quickly.”

Sara Hartse

Software Engineer

The Solution

Render adopted Checkly to modernize their monitoring practices, starting with basic uptime checks and expanding into a comprehensive observability platform using Checkly Traces.

  • Scalable Setup: Render leveraged Checkly’s Terraform provider to automate check creation across their infrastructure. This approach ensured complete coverage across 10 clusters and multiple service types, saving significant manual effort.
  • Tracing Integration: Render integrated OpenTelemetry (OTel) with Checkly, gaining visibility into latency at service boundaries and identifying bottlenecks in real-time.
  • Collaborative Monitoring: Tagging and Slack integration enabled engineers to filter, manage, and act on alerts efficiently, improving communication and response times.

Checkly Traces—Making Issue Resolution Faster and Easier

Render uses Checkly Traces to quickly spot and fix performance issues. By integrating OpenTelemetry (OTel), they track latency across services and pinpoint where problems happen.

Here is an example: A customer reported slow performance for their AI bot. Using Traces, Render discovered the issue wasn’t on their end but due to inefficient database queries by the customer. The team resolved it in under an hour—something that used to take about a day.

Traces also help Render catch internal issues, like firewall misconfigurations, before they hit production. It’s saved them time and given their team—and their customers—more confidence.

how checkly traces work

"Checkly was incredibly easy to integrate. Even our initial traces setup was quick, and the documentation was better than OTel’s own.”

Brian Stack

Infrastructure Engineer

The Results

With Checkly, Render transformed their monitoring workflows—resolving issues faster, improving reliability, and empowering teams across the organization.

"Most support cases are about figuring out whether it’s our code or the customer’s code. Traces give us a definitive answer and add certainty to those conversations," Sara Hartse, Software Engineer.

Improved Time-to-Resolution

Render has dramatically reduced debugging time, resolving issues that once took a week in just minutes or hours. With Checkly Traces, they’ve streamlined troubleshooting by identifying and addressing bottlenecks quickly, like detecting and fixing internal misconfigurations before they impact production.

Proactive and Reliable Monitoring

With Checkly, Render proactively detects and resolves issues before they reach production. For example, firewall misconfigurations that might have caused downtime are now caught early. Automated checks with tagging give a clear, real-time view of performance across clusters, making it easier to identify trends and address anomalies quickly.

Streamlined and Scalable Workflows

Render ensures consistent monitoring across all clusters and services by automating check creation with Terraform and using tagging for organization. User-friendly dashboards and SSO have empowered support teams to manage checks independently, reducing reliance on the infrastructure team and fostering greater efficiency.

Customer Confidence

Checkly enables Render to identify and address issues faster than ever, often before customers even notice them. Traces provide clear answers during support interactions, making it easy to determine whether latency or errors stem from Render’s platform or customer applications, boosting trust and reliability.