The Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline Team Spends Less Than 1% of Their Time Managing Checkly

Before adopting Checkly for synthetic monitoring, Chronosphere lacked visibility into uptime and latency metrics they could share with customers. Additionally, Chronosphere is the primary maintainer of the Fluent Bit website and wanted to ensure that the open-source community continued to get great support when accessing and reading documentation. This system resided outside Calyptia’s main infrastructure and had more restrictions due to it being under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a graduate project. 

These gaps motivated Chronosphere to find a synthetic monitoring tool that would alert the team immediately when incidents happen and allow them to respond to downtime quickly.

During the research process, the team was looking for a solution that would: 

• Be easy to implement 
• Be cost-effective
• Have a Terraform provider

As Chronosphere was already using Terraform to manage their services infrastructure, they could start right away, thanks to Checkly’s Terraform provider. Additionally, Checkly’s customers save up to 80% compared to legacy monitoring solutions, which makes Checkly the most cost-effective synthetic monitoring solution on the market. 

“Let’s say, we have an incident or feature we want and it turns out to be some aspect that potentially we could cover with Checkly, then we'll make a change to the Git repo that then uses Terraform to make the check and the rules. We also use Checkly to run maintenance windows,” says Patrick Stephens, Technical Lead at Chronosphere. 

Checkly’s MaC (Monitoring as Code) approach fits perfectly with Calyptia’s IaC processes, as they manage Checkly via GitOps. Implementing monitoring this way enabled them to keep their processes as they were without having to change anything. 

One of the biggest benefits of this setup is that Chronosphere's team can experiment with setting things up manually to quickly test and verify any new checks or changes. This is then easy to transfer directly to IaC so they get the benefits of rapid prototyping and IaC together.

Chronosphere also uses Checkly to host their status page, where they communicate maintenance windows with their customers. If anything happens, the team gets notified via PagerDuty, Slack, and other channels. 

The benefits of implementing Checkly were immediately visible. Chronosphere was able to reduce the time it took for them to address support requests. 

Checkly also gives Chronosphere latency and other service metrics. This way, they can directly measure the impact of the infrastructure changes they make from a completely external, objective viewpoint. 

“Before we adopted Checkly, we might not be aware of an issue on the open source websites until a user notified us. Things like DNS registrations being removed or updated can take 24 to 48 hours to propagate the fix, which is quite a long time. Proactive monitoring now means issues should be resolved without downtime.”

The number of support requests that arrive now is much lower, especially during maintenance windows, and addressing them takes up to five minutes. Checkly enables Chronosphere's team to communicate downtime more effectively via their status page, so customers and support teams can easily triage incidents. 

At the same time, the team spends less than 1% of their time managing Checkly. This aligned perfectly with their request to minimize the staff training time and the maintenance required. 

The Terraform provider was the main feature Chronosphere's team was looking for in a monitoring solution. 

“We use Terraform to manage our infrastructure, and we want to keep things consistent, so we want to use the same process for everything infrastructure-related. That’s why Checkly’s Terraform provider perfectly fits our existing development environment, and it was very easy to get started,” explains Patrick Stephens, Technical Lead at Chronoshpere. 

According to him, the team sets up the configuration and puts it directly into Terraform, without any translation required, which is very handy for them. 

Another key thing they were looking for was an SSO integration. Checkly’s SSO integration comes in and enables the team to access the tool easily and onboard people in minutes, avoiding a lot of manual setup.