We just released a new major 5.0.1 version of the Checkly CLI. You can also view the release note for 5.0.0 to check all PRs merged on GitHub.

Here’s what’s new.

Node.js 16.x is no longer supported

As Node.js 16.x was marked End-of-Life late 2023 we’ve released a new major CLI version and updated all relevant dependencies to a later Node.js major version.

New Alert Channel constructs

This release introduces CLI support for three existing alert channels. You can specify them with their corresponding constructs:

• Incident.io

• Microsoft Teams

• Telegram

Use these new constructs to define these alert channels, just like you would with any other alert channel construct:

import { IncidentioAlertChannel } from 'checkly/constructs'

export const incidentIoChannel = new IncidentioAlertChannel('my-channel-01', {
  name: 'ACME incident channel',
  url: 'https://api.incident.io/v2/alert_events/checkly/xxxx',
  apiKey: '1234abcd' // or use process.env.INCIDENT_API_KEY! and provide the key on the command line
  sendFailure: true,
  sendRecovery: true,
})

Learn more about using the new constructs in the CLI constructs reference docs.

Degraded state in reporters

We added the degraded state to all relevant reporters. Previously, Checkly reported degraded checks as passing, which was not great. On the default list reporter, the output for a degraded check will look as follows:

To get started with the Checkly CLI, run:

npm create checkly@latest 

Or upgrade to the latest Checkly CLI version with:

npm install -D checkly@latest

Happy monitoring!

Questions or feedback? Join our Slack community.

🚀 Try Checkly Traces today & Upgrade Your Monitoring!

We’re excited to announce that Checkly Traces is now generally available – delivering full end-to-end observability to your monitoring workflow.

Traces provide the right context to debug your failed and degraded checks, reducing your time to find the root cause!

What started as our OpenTelemetry Tracing integration in beta, has now grown to be a robust solution to complement your automatic checks.

Check out the integration docs for your codebase: Node.js, Next.js, Python, Ruby, Golang…

🔹 See exactly the underlying issues in your setup.

🔹 Identify trends in your underlying applications and services on the Check Overview page with the following:

• Services duration graph, which you can match to your check’s response times.

• The top 3-erroring spans, with a link to the latest check result that had this specific error.

  

🔹 See errors globally and identify trends in your services with the Traces Overview page

Your checks may target the same underlying applications and services, and that’s exactly what the Traces Overview page is for!

• Get a performance overview for those particular Spans selected

• Analyze duration and underlying issues for a particular Service in your backend

• View all spans and traces to see every event in your system while running your checks.

🛠 Start using Checkly Traces for free!

Checkly Traces are available on all plans. Get Started today and experience faster resolution with the immediate insights they provide:

• ｡🇯‌🇸‌ Node.js

• ｡🇯‌🇸‌ Next.js

• 🐍 Python: Django and Flask

• 🇬🇴 Golang

• 💎♦️ Ruby

• (and more!)

💼 Upgrading for more coverage

Checkly Traces are designed to scale with your team’s and business needs. To upgrade to the right plan that fits your organization:

1. Trial traces to explore all features

2. Contact our support team or your account executive for a personalized quote tailored to your usage and needs.

3. Enjoy Checkly Traces to debug with your team!

📊 Unlock Full Observability

Checkly Traces helps your teams diagnose issues faster, connect the dots across services, and ensure smooth application and services performance.

Don’t wait — start optimizing your monitoring today!

✨Happy monitoring!

Tell us what you think and what you’d love to see next! Leave a note in the feedback hub or connect with us in the Checkly community Slack.

We’ve been building some exciting features over January that we’d like to share with you all.

TCP Checks

TCP Checks are now available in Open Beta for all plans!

Use TCP checks to monitor infrastructure components. Simply specify your hostname or IP address and the TCP port to target:

Learn more in the TCP checks documentation.

Developer Experience

Delivering joyful developer experiences with Checkly is at the heart of what we do! This January, we’ve rolled out powerful enhancements to the Checkly CLI and API— designed to improve your workflow and make development smoother at every step 🚀

• 🕵🏻 You can now filter for check results with failures when querying /v2/check-results with the boolean parameter hasFailures — it’ll be true when the result has one or more failures. Check out GET v2/check-results documentation.

• 🚨 We’ve increased the number of alert channels that support custom handling of the check result error message. Use the variable $CHECK_ERROR_MESSAGE in these additional alert channels: Incident.io, Firehydrant, Discord, GitLab, Splunk, Teams, Telegram, Colarogix, and custom webhooks. Learn all about using variables in alerts here.

• 🌐 It’s now possible to set a Proxy URL for Private Locations through the Checkly API, matching the API functionality with the UI. ▶️ Create a Private location using the API .

</> Improving code imports!

• 🛣️ Support for TypeScript config paths is now here to simplify your import(s).

• ↪️ We’ve also added support for import 'node:path'. (Previously only import 'path' worked.)

• ↪️ You can also now use import './file.js' and have it map to ./file.ts .

🐛 Additional fixes:

• 🔠 Checks in the Home dashboard are now ordered alphabetically — also checks inside Check groups and groups themselves! — making it easier for you to find the check that you’re looking for.

  

• 🕸️ Revamped our log-in and sign-up pages; it’ll now be smoother for those of you using SSO!

  

• 🔢 Improved the UI for setting response time limits on checks – The dropdown has been replaced with a numeric input field, so you can set limits with more flexibility.

• Fixed the status displayed in the UI when a check is being retried. Once a check has failed, it now displays the status as failed until it succeeds.

• Fixed a UI bug unfolding Test Steps in a test case when there were several test cases in a single check result.

• Environment variables now ignore casing when checking if there are duplicate ones, so you can’t create both Hello and hello as distinct environment variables from now on.

We build Checkly with you in mind! And your feedback shapes our roadmap; tell us what you think and what you’d love to see next! Leave a note in the feedback hub or connect with us in the Checkly community Slack.

TCP checks are now available in open beta for all plan types! We’ve made several updates that we’re excited to share.

With TCP checks, you can monitor infrastructure components like databases, message queues, and mail servers—ensuring they stay connected and reliable.

For details on usage, reporting, and billing, check out the TCP checks documentation. You can also configure TCP checks via the CLI and Terraform provider—learn more in our developer docs.

✨ What’s new?

Alongside private location support (available from Checkly agent v4.0.3) and an IP family selector, we’ve rolled out several new capabilities for TCP checks:

• Monitoring as Code (MaC): Define and manage TCP checks via the CLI (v4.19.1) and Terraform provider (v1.9.0). Support for the Pulumi provider is currently in development.

• Assertions: Validate ‘response time‘ and expected ‘response data‘ to ensure your checks meet performance expectations.

• Data exchange: Send data to the target port and define assertions for expected responses, ensuring your service is both reachable and functioning correctly.

• “This request should fail” option: Mark TCP checks as successful when a connection fails, making it easy to test intentional unreachability. Once enabled:

  • Failed connections (e.g. timeouts or connection refusals) will be marked as passed.

  • Failing assertions will still cause the check to fail, regardless of connection status.

  • Successful connections will be marked as passed as usual.

✨ What’s next?

We’re continuing to improve TCP checks and will keep you updated on our progress!

Is there anything else you’d like to see? We’d love your feedback—Share your thoughts on our feedback hub or connect with us in the Checkly community Slack.

Happy monitoring!

Checkly now supports tsconfig.paths (and tsconfig.baseUrl) for checks and tests deployed using the Checkly CLI.

Specifically, paths now get bundled into your test sessions and checks when running npx checkly test and npx checkly deploy .

If you rely on paths already to simplify your imports and requires, we heard you. We know how troublesome it is to convert all the imports to a relative path instead—that’s why paths are now properly supported!

You can use TypeScript config paths using the latest CLI and Agent version, and it’s supported since:

• Checkly CLI version 4.17.0

• Checkly Agent version 4.1.0 - when using Private Locations

For those less familiar with paths, please check the TS config: paths documentation.

Using paths you can declare how TypeScript should resolve an import in your requires and imports!

If you’ve got any questions please join our Slack community.

Happy monitoring!

TCP checks are now available in early access, try them out today! The team at Checkly has been hard at work, and we’re excited to announce that TCP checks are ready for you to explore. Monitor critical infrastructure like databases, message queues, and mail servers to ensure connectivity and reliability. And this is just the start, with more features on the way soon.

🚀 How to get started

TCP checks are available across all plan types. To enable them in your account:

1. Go to the Labs section in your account settings.

2. Toggle on TCP Checks.

⚠️ Limitations: TCP checks are currently available only through the UI. Support for Monitoring as Code via CLI, Terraform provider, and Pulumi is currently in development.

Once enabled, you’ll see the option to create TCP checks in the UI. They share the same quota and pricing as API checks, making it easy to get started right away. For more details on configuration, results, and pricing, check out TCP Checks documentation.

🔮 What’s coming next?

We’re already working on exciting enhancements for TCP checks, including:

• Data exchange: Send data to a port and define assertions for expected responses, ensuring backend services are both reachable and functional.

• “Should Fail” option: Mark checks as successful when a connection fails—ideal for testing intentional unreachability.

• SSL certificate monitoring: Track certificate expiration dates for your TCP connections.

• Monitoring as Code (MaC): Support for TCP checks via the CLI, Terraform provider, and Pulumi.

Got feedback? We’d love to hear from you! Your input helps shape the feature and ensures it meets your needs. You can share your feedback on our feedback hub or connect with us via the Checkly community Slack.

Happy monitoring!

We’re very excited to tell you all about the smaller yet exciting changes that the team has shipped over the last few weeks.

🔍 Searchable tags in Dashboard

When heading into https://app.checklyhq.com/ — you’ll see that both the Search bar and the Tags filter now offer search across tags.

Whether you have a few tags or plenty, this improvement speeds up your workflow when digging through tons of checks in the dashboard. Making it faster and easier to find the checks you need.

By the way, tags are now also searchable in Heartbeats as well.

👋🏻 Be gone: reload this app to get updates

While we thought this little refresher was a nice way to show you how often we deploy small changes and improvements, it was more upsetting than helpful. We heard you! From now on, we’ll handle this more gracefully, without disrupting your flow.

🤖 Public API: check results endpoint v2

The new endpoint to fetch check results for a specific check: v2/check-results/{checkId} is 2 times faster than the old one and comes with these features:

• It’s cursor-based, which means you can paginate through the results.

• Use checkType, resultType , location and hasFailures to filter by location, check type and result to narrow down the list of check results.

• Set a specific time window using the from and to parameters (UNIX timestamp in seconds).

  • Removes the 6-hour timeframe requirement between the from and to fields.

Learn more in the v2/check-results/ endpoint docs.

Note that v1 has been deprecated.

A bit of everything:

• 🎭 Added support for Playwright’s HTTP Proxy. Define it using proxy: and sync it between playwright.config.ts and checkly.config.ts files using the npx checkly sync-playwright command.

• Community contributions to Checkly’s CLI, thank you ✨

  • 🏷️ New config option --fail-on-no-matching to return an error for npx checkly test when no matching tests exist for a given tag.

  • ✅ Fixed a docs URL to Playwright config in all example Project templates.

• 🔒 Checkly’s CLI now supports webhook channels containing secrets. This also means that when deploying an alert channel over the CLI, it won’t modify the alert channel set through the UI that had a secret in it.

• ☘️ The dashboard’s performance should be noticeably faster; we’ve even updated our checks to ensure it stays this way!

• 🐛 Fixed:

  • The public API now handles environment secrets when creating and editing groups.

  • Firefox issues when scrolling the modal with Check templates.

  • The dashboard sometimes missing round robin data for group checks.

  • The Check type filter in dashboard now counts the number of options selected.

  • When sending us non-checkly related telemetry spans, you’ll now get a rejected reply back saying “not originating from Checkly”.

  • Load setup/teardown dependencies for npx checkly trigger , matching the behaviour when running npx checkly deploy and npx checkly test.

Happy monitoring!

Questions or feedback? Join our Slack community.

Our latest runtime 2024.09 is now generally available to all Checkly users.

Since we released it in beta, the 2024.09 runtime uses Playwright 1.48.2 and Node.js v18.20.3.

Some key benefits of this new runtime are:

• Route method calls like route.fulfill() or route.continue() are not shown in the report and trace viewer anymore. You can see which network requests were routed in the network tab instead.

• If you are using Secrets with Checkly, Secrets are only going to be scrubbed when using runtime 2024.09 and later. Read more about managing secrets here.

Runtime 2024.09 includes now the following new dependencies:

• @clerk/testing 1.3.0

• mailosaur 8.6.1

• gaxios 6.7.1

• @kubernetes/client-node 0.22.0

• mysql 2.18.1

Please beware the following dependencies have been removed:

• chai

• chai-json-schema

• chai-string

If you use any of the chai packages above, we recommend refactoring your checks to use @playwright/test instead.

Check out the whole list of packages supported in the documentation for Runtime 2024.09

In case you have questions or feedback, or just want to share some Checkly experiences, join our Slack community and share your thoughts with other Checkly users from across the globe.

Happy monitoring!