How Checkly’s Monitoring as Code Helped commercetools’ Merchant Center to Increase Deployment Frequency by 7x

Before adopting Checkly, commercetools encountered infrequent manual deployments across numerous teams. This situation was rooted in:

• Lack of Comprehensive Uptime Checks: Previously commercetools’ Merchant Center had only basic uptime checks without deeper service validation. This meant that while they could determine if a server was online, they couldn't verify if their services were performing as expected. This limitation often resulted in undetected issues that affected the end-user experience.
• Manual Verification: Engineers manually verified deployments, which was time-consuming and error-prone. Each deployment required team members to manually check if all services were running correctly, leading to significant delays and the potential for human error. 
• Delayed Issue Detection: Issues were often discovered and reported only after they had already caused an impact, leading to prolonged resolution times and more reactive rather than proactive problem solving.

Adopting Checkly enabled commercetools to effectively transform the deployment process of their business user tooling. Checkly’s comprehensive Monitoring as Code provided commercetools with real-time insights, automated checks, and seamless integration, leading to significant operational improvements. 

commercetools benefited from various Checkly features and capabilities: 

• Playwright-Based Checks: commercetools' front-end engineers were particularly happy when Checkly announced its Playwright support, in addition to the CLI and its automation capabilities. These features enabled them to integrate comprehensive checks seamlessly into their workflows, creating detailed, browser-level tests to validate user interactions. The CLI's automation reduced manual effort and setup time, ensuring consistent and reliable monitoring across deployments.
• Validating Critical User Flows: Ensuring user logins, loading of initial pages, and verifying essential services functioned correctly by using Checkly’s API, browser, and heartbeat checks. This allowed the team to validate that critical functionalities such as login and sign-up were working as intended immediately both continuously and after deployment, reducing the risk of unnoticed issues affecting users.
• Integration with CI/CD Pipeline: The Checkly CLI enabled a seamless integration, automating setup through scaffolding from configuration files. This integration allowed commercetools to include monitoring as part of their continuous integration and deployment process, ensuring that every deployment was automatically validated for key performance and functionality criteria.

Using the Monitoring as Code workflow through the Checkly CLI, brought several operational improvements that streamlined commercetools' deployment processes.

• Automated Setup: Using Checkly CLI reduced the manual effort required for setting up checks. By automating the setup process, commercetools could quickly and consistently configure monitoring for new deployments, ensuring that all necessary checks were in place without the need for extensive manual configuration.
• Tagging System: Introduced to categorize checks by service and nature, enabling to focus triggered checks on specific deployment scenarios. This tagging system allowed the team to organize and manage their checks more effectively, ensuring that relevant checks were applied to each deployment scenario, enhancing the granularity and relevance of their monitoring.
• CircleCI Integration: Used to trigger post-deployment checks for immediate validation. Integrating Checkly with CircleCI meant that every deployment triggered a predefined set of checks, providing immediate feedback on the success and integrity of the deployment. This immediate validation allowed for faster identification and resolution of issues.

Using Playwright for automated tests and robust monitoring in production, the commercetools team detects issues within 1-2 minutes after deployment. This reduced the mean time to detect (MTTD), minimizing the impact on users and allowing the team to take corrective actions 10x faster than before. 

Moreover, the team has transformed its approach to problem-solving, shifting from a reactive to a proactive stance. Now, they address problems before they can impact customers, making a significant impact on the user experience.

"Before, we sometimes noticed issues too late,meaning that we were made aware through customers. As a customer-first business, this was frustrating and far from ideal. The number of unknown issues after deployments is now close to zero. Either a frequently running check or the deployment check failing something within a minute signals a problem in an initially targeted environment. Now the MTTD is significantly down from more than ten minutes," said Tobias Deekens, Remote Principal Engineer for Frontend Architecture at commercetools.

Checkly’s Monitoring as Code workflow lets commercetools define and manage monitoring configurations using code, bringing advantages like version control, collaboration, and automation. By using Checkly's CLI and configuration files, they can quickly set up and maintain monitoring across multiple environments. 

"We have everything defined in a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions using the CLI. Everything scaffolds out based on a configuration, so we just update a configuration file which specifies the environments, what services are there, what the URLs are, and from that, we just generate all the groups and their checks," Tobias Deekens added.  

The transition to the Checkly CLI automation was completed in about two days while setting monitoring for new environments was reduced from 5-6 hours to 1-2 hours. This reduction in setup time allows the team to deploy and monitor new environments more rapidly. It also allows making changes across a fleet of environments more consistently without manually configuring everything in the interface.

The MaC workflow not only reduces manual effort but also minimizes the risk of human error, ensuring that their monitoring setup is always up-to-date and aligned with their deployment changes. The ability to automate these processes has allowed commercetools to focus more on innovation and less on the operational overhead of maintaining their monitoring infrastructure.

commercetools' adoption of Checkly has drastically improved their deployment and monitoring processes, resulting in significant operational improvements.

Key achievements include:

• 7x Increase in Deployment Frequency: Moving from heterogeneous and weekly deployments to daily updates for 16 applications of the Merchant Center, enabling faster feature rollouts thanks to continuous testing and monitoring.
• 80% Reduction in Integrating Checkly Into new Environments: Streamlining the setup process from 5-6 hours to just 1-2 hours, boosting efficiency.
• 10x Faster Issue Detection: Rapid detection of issues within minutes post-deployment, allowing for swift resolution and minimizing impact on users.
• Quick Adoption of CLI: Integrating Checkly's CLI in just two days, significantly automating and simplifying the monitoring setup process.
• Enhanced Security Through Proactive Monitoring: Implementing comprehensive security checks to ensure all services meet stringent security standards, protecting user data and maintaining system integrity.

By integrating Checkly, commercetools has not only improved their technical workflows but also fostered a more secure and reliable development environment. Ready to start detecting and resolving issues 10x faster? Start for free today or book your customized demo.