Checkly updates app.checklyhq.com

Big updates for the TV-mode dashboards!

1. You can now create multiple TV-mode dashboards, based on your plan! The Starter plan already has five dashboards. Using tags, you can create distinct dashboards for different services, customers or departments.

2. We just enabled free 🔒 SSL for all dashboards using a custom domain! Check out our docs for more information on dashboards.

Learn more about TV-mode dashboards.

As of last week, you can now view and resend your invoices on the https://app.checklyhq.com/account/billing page.

All invoices from mid March 2019 onwards will be visible there. Any older invoices are still on file, but not visible. If you need a copy, just reach out to info@checklyhq.com.

Checkly is growing! This means we are making some changes to how Checkly works and operates as a business. The following changes will be rolled out over the coming week.

1. Checks will now rotate through different regions. We used to fire all checks from different regions at the same time. This sounds great in theory: more datapoints! More = better, right?

It turns out it actually does not contribute to a dependable and stable monitoring platform.

• It creates “mini DDOS attacks” influencing the measured response time.
• It creates syncing headaches when doing “destructive” checks that create or delete data.
• It has a cost structure that prohibits easy and predictable pricing.
• It clogs up log files and messes with analytics tools. From now on your checks will rotate through the configured locations.

Q: Doesn’t this impact the reliability of the checks? A: No, as we double check from two different regions the moment a check fails for one region.

Q: Will I see less check results? A: Yes, but the results are more accurate and easier to reason about.

2. We will offer a $7 developer plan. Solo developers and personal projects can start using Checkly for the price of $7 per month. You get 5 API checks and 1 browser check, a public dashboard and 10 SMS messages per month.

More advanced features are reserved for the bigger plans. All details will appear on the pricing page soon.

3. We are now incorporated in the Netherlands We’re switching from curry wurst to stroopwafels: Checkly is now incorporated as a brand under the company Pink Robots B.V. registered in the Netherlands (think C-Corp). Before that we were an “owner run” company in Germany.

Tim Nolet Founder @ Checkly

Small but important tweak. We just added the 7 day success ratio metric to all dashboards. This metric, placed right next to the 24 hour success ratio, gives more context when assessing a recent outage.

You may have also noticed smaller UI tweaks to the dashboard to optimise legibility and screen real estate. This tweaks are part of an ongoing effort to make the dashboard better and better.

Users with accounts created before January 10th 2019 might have gotten SSL alerts before their configured threshold if one of the SSL certificates they are monitoring was within 30 days of expiration.

On January 10 we introduced threshold monitoring, allowing you to set when you want to receive alerts for expiring SSL certificates. Accounts created for that date were only partially migrated to the new scheme due to a failure on our side.

We now migrated all accounts and the proper 30, 14, 7 or 3 day thresholds are taken into account when alerting for SSL expiry.

We just shipped an update that changes how we handle integrations.

1. We moved Pagerduty settings to the new integrations tab on the account page.
2. We added a beta version of our Prometheus integration 🎉. This exciting new feature allows you to expose Checkly metrics to Prometheus and use your own central graphing, dashboards and alerting.

Read more about using Prometheus with Checkly in our docs

Our DNS provider was having a reduced service / outage. Domains for api.checklyhq.com and app.checklyhq.com were not or less reachable from the Seoul (ap-northeast-2) and Frankurt (eu-central-1) regions. This means you could have had errors or empty responses loading the Checkly web application or triggering checks using triggers that call the API.

We have verified that using the Google operated 8.8.8.8 DNS resolves all Checkly domains correctly.

We just pushed some small tweaks for the UI:

✅ On the dashboard, the filter and sort buttons now show the current state better and more inline with the overall UI.

✅ On the results page, clicking a point in the graph takes you to that specific check result. Note, this only works on non aggregated data points.

Thanks to the users suggesting these refinements 🤘

We just rolled out an update to how we handle binary response bodies for API checks, i.e. movies, sound clips or PDF's.

Up till today we parsed and stored these best effort. This gave no guarantee on how/if/when a valid representation could be either inspected or stored in our back end.

We changed this behaviour in our update today. We now scrub response bodies that have the following content types as indicated by the Content-Type header.

application/pdf audio/wave audio/wav audio/x-wav audio/x-pn-wav audio/mpeg audio/x-ms-wma audio/vnd.rn-realaudio application/octet-stream application/ogg application/x-shockwave-flash application/zip video/mpeg video/mp4 video/quicktime video/x-ms-wmv video/x-msvideo video/x-flv video/webm

We rolled out some performance tweaks to resolve the delay in processing results. This should increase our processing capacity multiple times over. We will keep monitoring the situation.