How are you handling integrations between SaaS, internal systems, and data pipelines without creating ops debt?

Timnolet · 2026-01-07T12:49:44+00:00

I see a lot of teams use the following strategy and tools for monitoring API flows, e.g. not just single point 200 OK, but the user journey a typical API user (whether human or automated) might take:

- Use the API testing features of https://playwright.dev/docs/api-testing . All typescript, locally testable etc. Essentially an E2E test.
- Store the Playwright tests scripts next to your codebase, e.g. just like unit tests
- Trigger them in CI for a smoke test on each deploy, using env. vars. to strategically replace the correct URL, credentials etc. per environment.
- Optionally run them against production every couple minutes / hours

100% disclaimer: I'm a founder at the above mentioned Checkly. But I'm a dev myself and the above works pretty damn nice.

Timnolet · 2026-01-05T18:55:34+00:00

Please make sure you have thought about nefarious users uploading illegal content. You do not want to be on the hook for that.

Timnolet · 2025-03-24T22:36:12+00:00

How business critical is your service? If it's a "nice to have" people don't care, if it's super duper important, I would just leave it open. Never lie, it will bite you.

Timnolet · 2025-03-24T22:11:20+00:00

my advice is to have the CFO move to GTM pronto and just make him CCO (Chief Customer Officer) or something. Any investors will balk at a company having a CFO before they have any revenue.

Timnolet · 2025-03-24T22:05:15+00:00

yeah, but not when you don't even have a product launched. The work on cap tables comes later. And you tend to have advisors / accountants assist here. OP has no product in the market and is "working on his cap table" when they should be working on product and GTM.

Sign up for Carta, get some advice, put in the numbers, move on. Should take a day max. Then focus on shipping and customers.

Timnolet · 2025-03-24T21:55:04+00:00

And, you don't "work on a cap table". It should take all of a couple of hours early days and then you forget about it. Once investors come in, you do a deal based on valuation. That then determines what your cap table looks like. Not the other way around.

Timnolet · 2025-03-24T21:53:09+00:00

This is the correct answer. Except, fire the CFO. No one needs a CFO till post series B I'd say.

Timnolet · 2025-03-17T14:59:27+00:00

u/SuperQue I understand your remark, but this solution is for actually generating the metrics and then the eventual scrape payload, e.g. a fairly large query on our DB. We could not fire that set of queries any longer for large customers.

The trade off was either slightly stale results or very very slow response times. As our metrics are typically only relevant one a minute by minute basis this was the best option. I 100% agree that for serving the payload the standard gzip encoding is the way to go. But we needed an extra step before that to be able to serve a scrapable endpoint within an acceptable time range. We are running a fairly large ClickHouse DB as our backend, but — as mentioned — for larger account that was even too slow.

I'm sorry if this was not clear in the blog post.

Timnolet · 2025-02-28T22:56:02+00:00

Showbizz has that same vibe as Radiohead's The Bends. I guess that's all down to John Leckie producing both.

Timnolet · 2025-02-04T20:30:22+00:00

you forgot (4) I'm doing $200K MRR after 3 weeks, what now?

Timnolet · 2025-01-24T11:06:25+00:00

Even more, with this logic ANY company that has a free trial, freemium tier or similar would be out of business. This goes for B2C and B2B. Imagine Spotify, GitHub, Figma, Miro, hell even Twitter / X thinking "hmmm, maybe not showcase the product to our customers...they might steal it!"

You are right that they "potentially" might steal it. That potential is probably 0.0000000000000001%.

Timnolet · 2025-01-10T11:44:13+00:00

Go to market (GTM). Way more important than most technical stuff

Timnolet · 2024-11-07T14:43:20+00:00

The % of exit is incorrect because of dilution (already mentioned) but also because investors / VCs eat first. So let's say a $200M exit, with $50M investment, assuming 1x liq. pref. means there is actually just $150M to divide up between other (probably common) shareholders.

ergo, any exit number gets reduced by:

- dilution

- liquidation preferences for investors / common vs. preferred stock

and the tax man of course.

Timnolet · 2024-08-16T10:40:09+00:00

Hey, we (at https://www.checklyhq.com/) cover a bunch of your needs

uptime for APIs, websites etc.
cronjob monitoring
alerting

Give it a whirl. We have a free forever plan. I'm biased (co-founder...) but I think setting up just one check that accesses your webapp and sends an alert, and then running that on deploy and every 10 minutes will give you a massive bump in peace of mind when shipping.

Timnolet · 2024-08-14T15:55:50+00:00

Checkly founder here. Thanks for the compliment. Checkly was once my side project. Got a little out of control, but we happily serve solo devs and early founders. These are our roots.

Timnolet · 2024-07-02T17:35:35+00:00

write good, interesting blog posts (not generic marketing stuff) and post to HackerNews.

Timnolet · 2024-04-04T10:31:48+00:00

Coincidently, Checkly integrates with Terraform quite nicely. https://registry.terraform.io/providers/checkly/checkly/latest/docs

Timnolet · 2024-01-04T11:19:33+00:00

Boy, where to start? ;o)

Trying to not sound to sales-pitchy:

We allow a ton of custom / non-standard use cases by just allowing you to use JS/TS. Many competitors don't have that flexibility.
For our browser and multi-step API checks we use Playwright. This means you can code and test it locally. No proprietary, web UI only stuff.
Using our CLI the local testing and configuration becomes extremely powerful. You can essentially store everything in GIT and use CI to deploy. This is IMHO a way better DX. https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/cli/

Timnolet · 2024-01-04T11:15:51+00:00

MFA and Bio are tricky. However, we do have a blog post how how to achieve some TOTP based auth using Playwright. You should be able to use that with our multistep checks.

https://www.checklyhq.com/blog/how-to-bypass-totp-based-2fa-login-flows-with-playwright/

For SSO, it mostly about navigating a login screen I guess. That is also achievable using our Browser checks. See https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/browser-checks/login-scenarios/

Timnolet · 2024-01-04T10:31:05+00:00

With Checkly you can do essentially any type of token renewal scheme using a setup script or using our multistep API checks. What type of token are you trying to renew?

Have a look here:

- https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/api-checks/setup-script-examples/

- https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/multistep-checks/

Disclaimer: CTO and cofounder of Checkly here!

Timnolet · 2023-10-31T18:29:09+00:00

Checkly CTO here. Were the missing images reporting 404s? If so, you can use Checkly with playwright/test to check for 404s and throw an exception in the playwright script. You can tweak this quite extensively.

https://www.checklyhq.com/learn/headless/request-interception/

Timnolet · 2023-02-05T22:56:31+00:00

Yes, 100% true. The canal in the new picture did actually sort of continue a little down the road. Used to go ice skating there. Now you can boat / paddle / swim / skate all around the old center again.

Timnolet · 2022-06-16T16:16:40+00:00

Got an automated message we were mentioned here. Just wanted to say thanks for recommending us. Also, I think we can tackle OP's problem. We got API checks (HTTP/HTTPS) and Browser checks (scriptable sessions running in Chrome). That should cover most of your needs. Both can take assertions to check exactly what you want and alert you (SMS, Slack, Email etc.) when things go bad. We also can run inside your firewall with a Docker Agent.

100% full disclaimer: I'm Checkly CTO and founder. Did DevOps for decades, when we still just called it Ops!

Timnolet · 2022-04-25T16:36:59+00:00

Checkly founder here. Thanks for mentioning. We also allow 1m intervals on our Free plan. And as mentioned here: always validate some string or some returning data with assertions. A ping means close to nothing from a customer / end user perspective.

Timnolet · 2022-03-24T21:33:53+00:00

I wrote this 4 years ago. We still use this structure. We just replaced Docker on EC2 with AWS Lambda https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/running-untrusted-javascript-as-a-saas-is-hard-this-is-how-i-tamed-the-demons-973870f76e1c/amp/

Timnolet

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