How Kizen Reduced Production Challenges While Saving 20% in Engineering Hours

A group of enterprise consultants founded Kizen in 2018. They created a platform that enables every business to leverage predictive automation and big data — without astronomical costs. Their frontend is built with popular web development libraries and frameworks, like React and Redux. Their backend is built with the Python web framework, Django. Each part of their stack communicates over a RESTful API. For their infrastructure automation, they use Jenkins.

Kizen did not have a synthetic monitoring system in place and needed to fill that gap with a robust tool that was straightforward to set up and fit into their development workflow. They also needed to replace legacy monitoring tools, like New Relic, after a big replatforming effort.

Keegan Donley, Senior Front-End Engineer said, “We needed synthetic monitoring for two things. One is our production monitoring to ensure that our platform is available to customers. We also monitor lower environments, like our integration and staging environments. These lower environments, while not customer-facing, are critical to our team being efficient. Testing in staging also allows us to catch test incompatibilities before deploying to production.”

The Kizen team also needed a synthetic monitoring tool that integrated with their existing end-to-end test suite written for use with Playwright Test, the popular framework for web testing and automation. Additionally, they wanted the ability to check their Playwright test code into version control and automatically stay in sync with the rest of their codebase.

In June of 2022, Keegan and his colleagues began searching for a monitoring solution and decided to evaluate Checkly.

Once Kizen decided to use Checkly, their engineers quickly got up and running, because of Checkly’s integration with Playwright Test. Donley explained, “We have saved a lot of time —about a 20% time savings—by using Playwright on Checkly.  We have an end-to-end test suite that is very large and that has been written over the course of a couple of years. We have a ton of team knowledge on how to use Playwright, so being able to spin up our first checks within just a minute or two, since the code was already written, was extremely useful and saved us a lot of time”.

Similarly, Checkly’s GitHub Sync feature—which enables Checkly users to synchronize browser checks with JavaScript files in a GitHub repository—allowed the Kizen team to collaborate on their monitoring work. As Donley expanded, “A standout feature of Checkly is that checks are version controlled. This was ideal because it allowed the team to follow the same process they follow for everything else –code review, pull request. This means anyone on the team is already familiar with the process and can pick up a check and work on it.”

The numerous third-party alerting integrations Checkly offers also provided the Kizen development team with ways to efficiently monitor their platform using their existing tool-chain. Donley mentioned how they primarily use Slack for alerts from Checkly, which allows them to quickly see the details and severity of the alert, and then triage things quickly in Slack.

Checkly’s user interface, robust feature-set, and third-party integrations enabled Kizen to incorporate synthetic monitoring into their existing workflow, and gain more confidence when rolling out new deployments to their platform.

“As far as production monitoring for our users goes, we have had some situations where we make a change and we are able to catch that something is not quite right in lower environments before it gets to production,” says Donley.  “It gives us a lot more confidence when rolling out a deployment to a key system, like our email infrastructure. We don’t need to wait for a customer to encounter a problem and then send us an email to find out that something went wrong with our rollout.”

With Checkly’s synthetic monitoring running on Kizen’s production, development, and testing environments, the Kizen development team has achieved a new level of confidence in each of their deployments.

“The most immediate positive impact Checkly has had on Kizen is being able to be confident in the new features and updates that we roll out on our platform,” says Donley. We need to be confident that our platform is functioning, and Kizen is a critical platform for our customers. If a Kizen customer in the Fintech space can’t log into their Kizen ƒCRM and access any of their clients, that obviously has a huge impact on their business. So having this confidence is super critical for us”

Kizen’s ƒCRM and operations platform supports thousands of users in the healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, real estate, fintech, and education sectors. Their no-code ecosystem uses a visual drag-and-drop interface to fully customize the platform  to support each user’s workflows and easily surface the insights they need to optimize their business. And thanks to advanced synthetic monitoring from Checkly, Kizen is even more confident in the services they provide their customers.