Getting started with Checkly dashboards

Checkly is a modern reliability platform that combines testing, monitoring and observability in one place. Its integration with Playwright and languages such as TypeScript means that developers can write tests using tools they are familiar with and then run them in Checkly. Its Monitoring as Code philosophy also means that Checkly tests can be incorporated into CI/CD pipelines.

Many teams using full-stack platforms like Dynatrace or Datadog choose Checkly for its developer-centric approach to synthetic monitoring. While the larger platforms offer broad visibility, Checkly provides better price-performance for high-frequency checks and a superior developer experience with its Monitoring as Code workflow.

With our new Checkly data source, you no longer have to choose between specialized functionality and unified visibility; you can correlate Checkly’s deep insights with your broader infrastructure metrics in a single pane of glass. The Checkly data source is one of our new Low Code Plugins – this means that it is open source. You can access the code on GitHub, update it to meet your own team’s needs and then share your changes with the SquaredUp community.

Accessing your Checkly data in SquaredUp is really simple. Create a new dashboard, add a tile and then select the Checkly data source:

Getting connected

To configure the data source you just need to enter your Checkly Account Id and your Checkly API key. SquaredUp will then build data streams and retrieve objects. Data streams are ways of packaging the raw data of a backend API into logical structures. Objects are the actual tests that you have created in Checkly.

Exploring the data streams

The Checkly data source consists of over a dozen data streams, organised into three groupings:

• Analytics
• Status
• Summary

The Analytics streams allow you to zoom in on particular metrics for a test – e.g. Average Response Time or Time to First Byte. The Status streams return a table with selected performance metrics, whilst the Summary streams provide overviews of your alerts and tests as a whole.

When the data source finishes loading it will present you with a number of out of the box dashboards. Below is the URL Monitor dashboard. This provides a drop-down list of all of your URL Monitors. Once you select a Monitor you will see a rich set of Checkly analytics:

Building our dashboard

Out of the Box dashboards are great for getting started, but let’s now look at building a dashboard like the one below from scratch.

The top section of this dashboard gives us an at-a-glance view of the status of the most important tests for our sites and services. To create this, we can use the SquaredUp Block visualisation. Just add a new tile to the dashboard and then select the data source. Next select the Summary – Status data stream:

This data stream will bring back status information for all of our tests. It has a built—in Status field. This is a field generated by SquaredUp which the Blocks visualisation can use as a health indicator

The next row of tiles provides an example of how you can use SquaredUp to gain deeper context by bringing together data from different sources within the same dashboard. In this instance we are checking for any correlation between production releases and potential impacts on our web site performance. In this example we have used the Analytics – URL Monitor data source. This allows you to select one or more of the URL Monitors that you have created in Checkly:

Then, in the Configure parameters step, you can select the specific metric you wish to visualise:

In this instance we are bringing together web performance data with metrics from the SquaredUp Azure DevOps data source. Of course, with SquaredUp’s range of 60+ data sources and the SquaredUp Web API data sources your options are almost unlimited. For example, you can combine your Checkly analytics with diagnostics from sources such as K6, Snyk and SonarQube.

Playwright integration

One of the most powerful features of Checkly is its Playwright integration. This enables developers to script multi-step tests to validate not just that a particular URL is available, but also to verify that the page is rendering and functioning as intended. We have created a test to check that our sales process is working as intended and want to be alerted if there are any failures in the tests. To do this we will add a new tile to the dashboard and this time use the Analytics – Playwright data stream and select our Sales Process Check.

This dataset contains a field called hasFailures — which indicates whether any of our tests are failing. We want to use this as the State field for our tile so that we can use the Block visualisation. To do this we will click on the Columns option and add a Custom Column. We will set the column type to State and then enter an expression:

We have deliberately inserted some errors into our Playwright script so the tests are showing as failed on our dashboard:

Using Monitors

Failures like this might be regarded as high priority issues that we might want to escalate to a higher level. In SquaredUp we can create Monitors, which will roll up to Workspace or even Organisation level. To do this we can edit our tile and then switch on the Monitoring toggle:

If we now switch to our Workspace dashboard, you can see that this Monitor has automatically rolled up, bringing immediate visibility to relevant stakeholders.

Summary

By integrating Checkly with SquaredUp, you gain the context that brings operational intelligence to your synthetic tests. You move away from reactive monitoring and toward a more proactive, code—driven reliability strategy that empowers every team — from the engineer writing the code to the stakeholders who evaluate business impact.

Whether you are validating a mission—critical API or ensuring your global web services are performant, the combination of Checkly’s Monitoring as Code approach and SquaredUp’s unified visualisation capabilities can enable you to build a modern platform for enterprise reliability.

If you don’t have a SquaredUp account you can sign up for our free forever tier and be visualising your Checkly metrics within minutes.