Checkly’s Impact on BÆRSkin: Enabling Daily Deployments and Reducing Response Times by Over 50%

BÆRSkin Tactical Supply Co. is an e-commerce store that offers outdoor apparel designed with a “grizzly-tough” aesthetic for both urban and wild environments. With a focus on quality and innovation, BÆRSkin aims to provide excellent customer experiences through its well-designed website and efficient fulfilment processes. 

As the company rapidly expands its product lines and customer base, maintaining website performance and reliability has become a critical priority. Implementing Checkly has significantly enhanced their monitoring capabilities, ensuring consistent and reliable performance.

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THE PROBLEM

The BÆRSkin team was facing several challenges when they decided it was time to search for a new monitoring solution: 

  • Rapid Growth: With a growing customer base and product line, robust monitoring solutions became critical. The diverse range of products and services necessitated a comprehensive approach to ensure consistent performance.
  • Manual Monitoring Challenges: Before adopting Checkly’s Terraform provider, BÆRSkin relied on manual checks and disparate monitoring tools, which proved inefficient and time-consuming. The lack of a Monitoring as Code approach led to inefficiencies and time-consuming manual checks.
  • Transition to Microservices: Their composable journey, the shift from a monolithic architecture to microservices, added complexity, making it harder to monitor each component effectively. The granular nature of microservices required a more sophisticated monitoring solution that could handle multiple services simultaneously and integrate closely into the development process.

"Checkly came in because before that, whenever we had an incident, someone would have to manually notify us instead of it being automated. With Checkly, our incident detection is now automated, which saves us time and ensures faster response."

Gus Fune

CTO

THE SOLUTION

Opting for a Monitoring Platform that Integrates Synthetic and Real Browser Checks for Full Coverage

After using tools like Pingdom, Uptime Robot, and Google Cloud Monitoring, BÆRSkin thoroughly evaluated Checkly’s features. The team was particularly impressed by Checkly's ability to combine synthetic monitoring with real browser checks. This dual capability was crucial for BÆRSkin, alllowing them to monitor both backend services and frontend user experiences comprehensively. Other key factors included: 

  • Integration with Existing Tools: One of the key factors in choosing Checkly was its seamless integration with other tools that BÆRSkin was already using, such as Playwright for testing and Sentry for error tracking. Checkly’s ability to fit into their existing ecosystem made the transition smoother and reduced the learning curve for the team. This seamless integration into the CI/CD pipeline ensured continuous monitoring and quick setup.
  • User-Friendly Interface and Documentation: The user-friendly interface and detailed documentation provided by Checkly were significant advantages. Even though BÆRSkin primarily used the Terraform provider for infrastructure as code, the intuitive interface made initial setup and exploration straightforward. The clear documentation also helped resolve any issues quickly during the integration process.  
  • Flexibility and Customization: Checkly offered a high level of flexibility and customization, allowing BÆRSkin to tailor their monitoring setup to their specific needs. Whether setting up heartbeats for scheduled tasks or creating custom API checks, the platform provided the necessary tools to ensure comprehensive monitoring. 

Among the tools that the BÆRSkin team tested, Checkly stood out as the best option due to its robust features, ease of integration, and overall cost-effectiveness.

THE IMPACT

Improved Incident Response and More Deployment Confidence

The introduction of Checkly improved BÆRSkin’ approach to monitoring, leading to notable improvements in incident response times and operational confidence.

  • Improved Incident Response: With Checkly, automated alerts have replaced manual notifications, drastically reducing response times. This automation is crucial in preventing small issues from escalating into major problems.  Checkly’s comprehensive alert system enables BÆRSkin to detect and resolve issues swiftly, often before customers are affected, ensuring potential disruptions are managed efficiently.
  • Quick Setup Time: Thanks to the Monitoring as Code (MaC) approach, monitoring is now implemented in BÆRSkin’ CI/CD process. As a result, setting up checks now takes a matter of seconds with Checkly, compared to up to 15 minutes per new service before. This efficiency gain has streamlined their deployment process and allowed for more frequent updates and quick issue resolution.
  • Process Optimization: A specific code optimization task initially took four minutes to complete. After using Checkly to identify and address underlying issues, the processing time was reduced to two and a half minutes, and eventually down to four seconds. This optimization not only improved performance but also showcased Checkly's role in fine-tuning and enhancing operational processes.
  • Increased Deployment Confidence: Checkly’s monitoring capabilities gave BÆRSkin the confidence to deploy new features and updates more frequently, knowing that any issues would be promptly detected. This increased agility was critical in maintaining great user experience. 

"Instead of having to manually set things up in other tools, we now use Checkly, which integrates seamlessly into our workflow and takes literally less than a minute to set up checks. This has streamlined our processes and improved efficiency."

Gus Fune

CTO

Leveraging Heartbeat Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

BÆRSkin uses Checkly's heartbeat monitoring to track scheduled tasks and processes, ensuring they run as expected. These tasks send heartbeat signals upon successful completion, and any missed signals immediately alert the team to potential issues. 

This implementation has been invaluable, providing early detection of issues and increasing the reliability of critical operations. Proactive alerts and insights into task performance enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of incident response, ensuring smooth operations and improving the customer experience.

Checkly x BÆRSkin: A Strategic Partnership for Growth

Checkly has proven to be an invaluable partner for BÆRSkin, transforming their approach to monitoring and providing the tools necessary to maintain high standards of website performance and reliability.
Here are the key achievements that resulted from this partnership: 

  • Over 50% reduction in incident response times
  • Increased deployment confidence and frequency
  • Streamlined monitoring setup and maintenance
  • Enhanced customer satisfaction through improved website performance

"Using Checkly has been very positive for us. The rapid notification system allows us to respond to issues quickly, minimizing downtime and maintaining smooth operations." Gus Fune, CTO at BÆRSkin. 

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