Developers at medium to large companies often face challenges in tracking the multitude of software development tasks and bugs that require attention. A recent 2024 survey by Dynatrace highlights that 88% of tech leaders report an increase in the complexity of their technology stacks over the past year, which has made it increasingly difficult to provide an optimal customer experience.
While many observability vendors market their solutions as a remedy, Hannes Lenke, CEO and co-founder of Checkly, argues that many of these options are prohibitively expensive and impose hefty additional fees for essential features, support, and maintenance.
"Access to comprehensive observability and monitoring tools is limited for engineers, and many of these solutions still operate in silos," explained Lenke, who co-founded Checkly in 2018 with Tim Nolet and Timo Euteneuer. "Additionally, traditional monitoring tools can burden companies with high costs, driving the need to migrate to more cost-effective options."
Initially developed as a side project by Nolet, Checkly aims to provide developers with actionable insights regarding their applications' performance and downtime through subscription-based synthetic monitoring tools. Synthetic monitoring—also termed active or proactive monitoring—evaluates software performance by simulating user interactions to track metrics such as response times and error rates.
Checkly's platform not only monitors software but also APIs, utilizing automated test scripts that can be scheduled or run continuously to identify potential issues. Users can define their monitoring parameters as code, maintaining version control, and leverage a unique "traces" feature to link backend failures to alerts.
"Our goal is to enable developers to identify and resolve issues ten times faster," Lenke stated. "With synthetic monitoring, you'll be the first to know when a problem arises, allowing you to address it before it affects your customers."
Lenke views established observability solutions like Datadog, Splunk, and New Relic as competitors, alongside newer players like Pingdom, Runscope, and Catchpoint. However, Checkly boasts a solid customer base, with over 1,000 paying clients, including names like 1Password, Vercel, and Yext. Currently, Checkly performs 32.5 million checks daily on APIs and software.
This impressive growth has drawn interest from investors. Recently, Checkly announced it secured $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Balderton Capital, with additional backing from Accel and CRV. This funding brings Checkly's total capital raised to $32.25 million, which will be allocated towards product innovation, expanding their 35-person Berlin team, and launching a new office in New York.
"We're experiencing a rising demand for Checkly," Lenke commented. "In response, we plan to scale our go-to-market teams to onboard even more customers."
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