Use the Catchpoint Terraform Provider in your CI/CD workflows

We recently made the Catchpoint Terraform provider available in the Terraform Registry, allowing our customers to manage their Catchpoint IPM tests with minimal configuration, enabling developers, SREs and DevOps teams to seamlessly integrate their Catchpoint data with Terraform.

In this blog, we’ll look at how the Catchpoint Terraform provider lets you create and manage your observability configurations as code, helping to increase efficiency, among other benefits, when spinning up new infrastructure.

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Terraform is all the terra-rage

Terraform has been around for just under a decade, helping you provision, manage and version your server, network and application infrastructure in the cloud and on-prem using a declarative configuration language. In the process, it enables higher standards for reproducibility and scalability, improving the efficiency and reliability of infrastructure management. As such, Terraform has become one of the most widely used (open source) Infrastructure as Code tools and an integral part of modern networking and CI/CD pipelines.

The benefits are multiple, including:

Faster provisioning and deployment: Increase the speed and efficiency of deployments through automated resource provisioning.
More efficient infrastructure management: Deploy applications on different clouds and on-prem through a single workflow; handle cross-cloud dependencies; easier change management and version control.
Resource optimization: Adapt to changing business needs and reduce unnecessary expenditure by scaling up or down infrastructure as needed and spend less time on infrastructure management thanks to increased automation.

Deploy observability as code with the Catchpoint Terraform provider

We’re delighted to offer our support for Observability as Code with Terraform. The Catchpoint Terraform provider allows you to create and manage your observability configurations as code, as part of your infrastructure. You can now reuse your existing Terraform workflows to manage your infrastructure and observability configurations in your CI/CD pipelines.

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The most common way we see our customers using Terraform is when they deploy new infrastructure, they can automatically create Web, API, Transaction, DNS, SSL, BGP, Traceroute, Ping, Playwright and Puppeeteer tests for that infrastructure. The Terraform plugin allows our users to also manage their Catchpoint tests and create alerts using Terraform, making the entire workflow easier to manage and fit together with your other important observability and infrastructure tooling.

Some of the further benefits of adopting observability as code practices include:

‍Achieving org-wide consistency - Managing Catchpoint resources through code allows you to repeat, scale and update your IPM profile in bulk, standardizing the testing profile for all critical services. Using a provisioning tool like Terraform means you can quickly set up shared resources like alerts and workloads, and easily share them among different teams, improving standards across the org while also speeding up startup time.
‍Version control and auditable history - Managing resources via observability in code in conjunction with an automated provisioning workflow sets up an auditable history for all teams to access when needed. Rollback and recovery through version control allows for a clearer, shared understanding of workflow choices and the ability to return to earlier versions if needed at a later date.
‍Reducing toil and driving value - In an era of constrained resources, it’s also worth remembering that IaC and Observability as Code helps to maximize the value you’re getting from your observability investments. The process of automating the configuration of your observability tools through observability as code has the human benefit of reduced toil and the organizational benefit of lower OpEx spend.

Your most talented SRE and DevOps resources can spend significantly less time provisioning infrastructure versus managing them via the user interface, a significant savings when working at scale.

How it works

If you’re already a customer, please reach out to your team member for more detailed documentation describing how to install and configure the Terraform provider with Catchpoint.

If you’re not currently a customer and are interested in finding out more about how to use Catchpoint’s IPM platform to assure application resilience across the DevOps lifecycle, check our Webinar on How to Achieve Agility with Stability.