Degraded states in Multistep checks

Signal non-critical slowdowns in Multistep checks with the degraded state, using soft assertions and the @checkly/playwright-helpers markCheckAsDegraded helper.

If you want to monitor your service for non-critical errors or performance degradations you can use the degraded check state. This allows you to signal that parts of a Multistep check performed slower than expected, or that it triggered assertions that are of lower criticality.

The degraded state does not affect your check’s success ratio like a failed state does. You can configure alert channels to notify you when a check has degraded.

To catch errors that are relevant for a degraded scenario you can use soft assertions. Soft assertions keeps your Playwright test running after it has encountered an error, unlike regular assertions which terminate the test. See the Playwright docs for more information on soft assertions.

To trigger a degraded state, checks use a helper library, @checkly/playwright-helpers, which is included in runtimes 2023.09 and later. The helper library contains two methods, markCheckAsDegraded and getAPIResponseTime.

Installing and Importing

npm i @checkly/playwright-helpers

TypeScript

import { getAPIResponseTime, markCheckAsDegraded } from '@checkly/playwright-helpers'

Getting The Request Response Time

To get the request response time, call getAPIResponseTime.

Usage

if (getAPIResponseTime(response) > 100) {
  markCheckAsDegraded('Response was too slow.')
}

Arguments

• response APIResponse (required). A response from a Playwright API request.

Marking A Check As Degraded

To mark a check as degraded, call markCheckAsDegraded.

This can be used when:

• The check is failing with soft assertions, or
• The check has no failures

If your check is failing due to a timeout or failed non-soft assertion it will be considered failing, even if markCheckAsDegraded is called.

Usage

if (foo.length > 100) {
  markCheckAsDegraded('Foo is too long.')
}

Arguments

• reason String (optional). Logged when the method is called. Used to identify which method caused the degradation.

Example of Marking A Check As Degraded

A check is marked as degraded when markCheckAsDegraded is called and there are no regular assertions triggered.

In this example we trigger a soft assertion if the API response time is too slow. We can get the response time by calling getAPIResponseTime with the request response as the parameter. At the end of the check we mark the check as degraded if any errors have been triggered during the test.

degraded-multistep.spec.ts

import { test, expect } from "@playwright/test"
import { getAPIResponseTime, markCheckAsDegraded } from "@checkly/playwright-helpers"

const baseUrl = "https://danube-web.shop/api"

test("Danube API books", async ({ request }) => {
  await test.step("get all books", async () => {
    const response = await request.get(`${baseUrl}/books`)

    // Check 200 status code
    await expect(response).toBeOK()

    // Check degraded status
    expect.soft(getAPIResponseTime(response), 'GET /books too slow').toBeLessThanOrEqual(200)

    return response.json()
  })

  // Trigger degraded state if check failed due to soft assertion
  if (test.info().errors.length) {
    markCheckAsDegraded('Check degraded due to soft assertion failure.')
  }
})

Triggering a soft assertion in a check but not calling markCheckAsDegraded will fail the check at the end instead of marking as degraded.