Checkly First Time Experience

Use case

At Fish Rules we have lots of APIs. Internally we can monitor them but we started using 3rd party API's and wrapping them for use and also we have 3rd parties now consuming our APIs. We needed to get more transparent on the monitoring. I found Checkly by accident and thought I'd try it.

Friction Logs

Delight

Vercel Integration

It took a couple clicks and boom, done (using Vercel’s integration). It auto selected repos in our org and set up basic front-end health checks. Stellar!

Delight

A very short distance to "A'ha!"

Setting up an API where I copy a cURL example was easy!

Friction

Templating wasn't straightforward

Some things it was easy to figure out how to template things, others, not so much. It definitely looked simpler when I was reading about it.

Delight

Adding "assertions" was easy and made a lot of sense

The “Add assertions” made it really easy to set these up and they link to https://jsonpath.com/ to drop in the JSON to test out.
It’d be nice if this was part of the UI though and it would auto-read JSON responses

Friction

Moving API's around isn't possible (?)

I couldn’t figure out how to move an API check in to a “group” (folder) after creating it.

Delight

Grouping API's helps keep things simpler

Groups make things DRY

Friction

Unexpected keyboard actions

Hitting escape when creating an API exits out and you lose all your edits, rather than exiting out of a modal that pops up when doing various things.

Friction

Loss of edits sometimes

While testing an API that isn’t saved and then closing the testing screen will cause the group screen to exit, and you lose all your edits.

Friction

The Finnicky Editor

Sometimes the editor won’t let you test because there is “unsaved” changes to the “group” even when it wasn’t true. It's also not always true when you're in this state or mode.

Friction

Related to the above point, the different modes lead to confusion to the various save states

Duplicating a request, editing and saving it, didn’t save and just kept the dup. record. I figured out there’s a weird combo of different save buttons you have to hit.

Blocker

Couldn't get ENV vars to work

I couldn’t figure out how to assign process.env.ENVIRONMENT_URL as the endpoint, even though the docs say to specify that.

Delight

Creating a status dashboard was a breeze

It took all of 2 minutes to deploy a status page. Very nice!

Friction

Notification for users

There's no way for visitors to subscribe for notifications?