How TrueLayer Automated Monitoring of Crucial Payment APIs with 60% Less Effort 

TrueLayer has a team of 130+ engineers using Checkly for all the monitoring and production testing they do. The DevOps team, which has six members, is accountable for managing Checkly.

Before migrating to Checkly, TrueLayer was relying on a different platform for all its monitoring. However, the solution they were using did not fully support Monitoring as Code through Terraform - they needed a more modern solution.

In particular, TrueLayer was looking for a solution for one specific use case - external checks for public entry points. It wanted to use the solution to ping and check API endpoints from the outside.

Put simply, the reason why the TrueLayer team started looking for another solution was to automate monitoring as much as possible.

After detecting the need for a modern monitoring solution, the TrueLayer team started looking for a new tool that would meet their external monitoring needs. They did research, and after testing and comparing 4-5 tools, they chose Checkly.

The main reason for choosing Checkly was its own Terraform provider. In addition to the Terraform provider, they were looking for one very specific feature that would help them integrate easily with PagerDuty, an incident response tool they were already using. This feature was the ability to tag checks in order to automatically page teams in PagerDuty based on the tag.

“Let’s say, if CheckAlessio triggers and has a tag app = Alessio, then basically PagerDuty receives the page and pings the right people or team. That was also one of our essential needs when we were looking for a new testing tool,” explains Alessio Casco, TrueLayer's Head of DevOps.

The onboarding and adoption of Checkly went pretty smoothly for the TrueLayer DevOps team and they’ve been Checkly users for more than 2.5 years. During the onboarding process, they were in constant contact with Checkly’s development team and their assigned solutions engineer, who ensured things went smoothly.

After using Checkly for two and a half years (and counting!) the TrueLayer team is very happy with the setup and is planning to expand the types of checks they’re monitoring with Checkly. 

The best part of using Checkly, according to TrueLayer’s Head of DevOps, is that he only needs to open the dashboard when things go wrong. There’s no maintenance needed from his team’s side - they can forget about the checks until they get an alert that something’s misbehaving.

“We set up all the checks when we started using Checkly and monitored them for a while. Then, when we saw that they were working and were configured as we wanted, we basically forgot about them. We trust the tool and we don't have to go every day and check that everything's green. We know it is,” - Alessio Casco, Head of DevOps at TrueLayer.

This “set it and forget it” approach allowed the TrueLayer team to tie the automated creation of checks and alert channels to the creation of new domains on their side, which was their primary goal when they decided to adopt Checkly. 

“Checkly made it very difficult to make mistakes because before we were creating the checks manually. And we could have made mistakes with the check. We could have forgotten or misplaced checks. Now, everything is automated. So the moment that we have an external domain, that domain will automatically create the check as part of the creation of the domain. We are now 100% certain that our checks cover everything.“

The team also feels that Checkly helps them hit their goals easily, as they can respond to incidents quickly.

Open banking is changing the way we see finances. Companies coming from this space have modern engineering teams, and are looking for testing and monitoring tools that are built to directly meet the needs of engineers. 

Checkly is a modern tool that empowers open banking API monitoring with a synthetic Monitoring as Code approach. Checkly directly meets the needs of engineers, empowering them to code their monitoring on their local machine, test their preview deployments in CI, and monitor in production. Based on open-source technologies like Playwright, Checkly removes vendor lock-in and puts control in the hands of engineers.