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

TrueLayer is one of Europe’s open banking pioneers. It has built a developer portal that provides open banking APIs and integrates bank payments into various apps, websites, and platforms. Two and a half years ago, TrueLayer reviewed its API monitoring needs and decided it wanted a monitoring solution tailored for modern teams. A reliable solution would help the TrueLayer team detect potential issues and outages faster, enabling them to deliver an outstanding user experience. As open banking strongly relies on APIs to provide access to financial data, TrueLayer needed to ensure security, accuracy, and reliable API performance at the same time—elements that are at the core of Checkly’s API monitoring solution.

The Problem

The Need for a Modern Solution for External Monitoring

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.

“We chose Checkly because of the Terraform provider that was available out of the box. Another important thing for us was the fact that we could automate the generation of the checks from Terraform.”

Alessio Casco

Head of DevOps at TrueLayer

The Solution

Checkly’s Terraform Provider Was Dominant Over Other Tools

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.

“Checkly works pretty well for us. It does what it says and it’s very reliable. The automation of our setup reduced the time we spent on monitoring by 60% and thus made us more efficient, as we are now able to know as soon as some of our endpoints are misbehaving.”

Alessio Casco

Head of DevOps at TrueLayer

The Impact

“We Set Up All the Checks and Forgot About Them”

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.

A representation of Checkly's production status

60%

Less time spent on monitoring with Checkly

2.5 years

Being a happy Checkly customer

130+

Engineers using Checkly

The Impact

A Fully-Automated Check Creation Process That Makes the TrueLayer Team 100% Confident in their Monitoring

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.

New Features

TrueLayer Is Adopting Heartbeat Checks - One of Checkly’s Most Recent Features

Most recently, Checkly has added heartbeat checks to its check types, in addition to API and browser checks. 

Heartbeat checks represent recurring messages or signals generated by a system, application, or service and are sent at regular intervals. Engineering teams use them to monitor scheduled tasks, backup jobs, or database updates. 

Checkly will watch and listen for the specified heartbeats. Should a monitored job fail to return a ping in the anticipated amount of time, an alarm will be sent via the configured channels to the on-call engineer or responsible team.

The TrueLayer team was very happy to hear this. Previously, they had been using another tool for their heartbeat checks, but they decided to move them to Checkly after we released the feature. They are very happy that they can have all their checks in one tool without having to use multiple tools for monitoring.

Conclusion

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. 

Effective and reliable open banking API monitoring

Programmable synthetic monitoring that seamlessly integrates into your existing development pipeline.