Every organization relies on mission-critical applications and services that ultimately generate revenue, so the user experience has never been more important. Companies trust their developer and operations (DevOps) teams to ensure important applications run smoothly. DevOps teams, in turn, trust application performance optimization tools to quickly identify and resolve issues or avoid them altogether in the first place.
Fixing the issues that drive user satisfaction is time sensitive. When application issues occur, alerts need to reach the right DevOps team member immediately. To ensure user satisfaction, tools also need to pinpoint details that enable rapid resolution. The more context provided around alerts, the better chance your applications have of delivering a great user experience.
The correlation between metric, log, and trace data is critical to effective application performance management. The more context your application optimization tool provides around these data points, the greater the value.
Stackify provides the right context around application performance metrics, full transaction-level traces, and integrated application and server logs. When troubleshooting why an application’s performance is off, Stackify “thinks” like your DevOps team thinks and provides the context needed to quickly connect the dots and resolve issues.
Let’s take a closer look at how the context Stackify provides leads to actionable insights.
On your way into the office, you receive an alert from Stackify. You’ve taken advantage of 24/7 monitoring configuration and text notifications. You know this issue is yours to solve, because Stackify told you so. You’re close to the office and head straight to your system to investigate.
Applications generate a whole lot of data. When you’re in real-time troubleshooting mode, you can’t afford to spend time sifting through metric, log, and trace data. Looking at your Stackify dashboard – personalized for the applications you’re responsible for and the data you value most – you see the alert concerns the status code of a URL you’re monitoring. It’s a 500-level error, the application is down, and it needs priority treatment, so you quickly open the App Dashboard for a high-level overview of the application you’re monitoring.
You know that trouble started at 7:38 am and triggered the alert. Stackify aligns metric, log, and trace data, enabling you to hop between views and simplify troubleshooting. Every dashboard and view includes advanced drill-down and search capabilities to get you the context you need swiftly. You drill into your log view, see an exception was thrown, and need more context to pinpoint the issue.
Stackify logs exceptions and automatically attaches code-level traces to each. Log views include a Trace Button for instantly hopping into trace views for additional context. With code-level insights correlated to exceptions, you can quickly jump to the trace view and get the context you need to fix your issue. In this case, you see that prior to the error, an endpoint was called and threw an exception error in the log statement that generated the alert.
By correlating the exception with trace data around the time the exception that was thrown, correcting the issue is easy.
With contextual data around every event, plus the ability to hop from virtually any view or dashboard to another, Stackify hands your developer and DevOps teams the information needed to make code-level corrections. The capability to pinpoint root causes fast speeds application optimization and keeps end users happy.
Personalized Stackify dashboards and views enable you to hone in on the data to do your job efficiently. Whether you’re responsible for creating applications, monitoring a single, business-critical application, or ensuring several applications always run smoothly, Stackify makes it easy to get the job done.
But value comes from ease of setup and ease of use. So, what makes Stackify’s custom dashboards better? Stackify delivers superior ease of use through simple dashboard creation and customization.
Role-based dashboarding enables managers to assign Read Only or Read/Write permissions to ensure every team member has the correct data to successfully perform their given duties. While this capability is common among some application optimization solutions, Stackify takes personalization further.
Personalized dashboards allow you to add different widgets based on the needs of what you’re monitoring. Widgets enable you to quickly create dashboards with multiple views of specific categories and simplify how you insert tailored data into your dashboards. Available in four overall categories – Errors/Logs, Application Performance, Monitoring/Metrics, and App Score – widgets include three to five metric views that further refine your data needs.
In our troubleshooting example, we were looking at an error log dashboard personalized for the website being monitored. Typical Stackify users would have had the trace view of that application on the same dashboard. However, to emphasize the value of hopping from view to view, our example kept those views separate.
You can also tailor dashboards for different environments, and creating overviews of different environments is extremely valuable for DevOps teams. For example, you can create dashboards for every step in the application development lifecycle: development, QA, staging / pre-production, and production environments. By capturing critical metrics on how code reacts in each environment, DevOps teams gain insights on potential code adjustments before pushing applications to production.
When looking at environments or your personalized dashboard, Stackify presents data in particularly useful formats. You can configure views across all applications on errors and logs, application metrics, server CPU and memory usage, slowest page loading, alert rates, recent errors, Apdex and proprietary application scoring, and so much more.
Every deployment update also creates a new environment. While the variables are not as vast as when you move a new application from pre-production to production, deployment updates present their own challenges. Stackify’s automated deployment tracking helps you ensure that application optimization improvements go as planned, and only positive results reach users.
Every time an application is deployed – whether a completely new version or an incremental update – DevOps and developer teams are looking to improve performance, add or refine capabilities, and fix issues.
Calling Stackify’s deployment API automatically triggers deployment tracking any time an application you’re monitoring is updated. Stackify provides an overview of what changed between the current and new versions, directing you to where those changes occurred. Armed with deployment-specific data, you can verify that intended fixes eliminated existing problems and ensure updates haven’t introduced new problems. You can also confirm that improvements and new capabilities are delivering their intended results.
By contextualizing the data you need most around metrics, logs, and traces, Stackify gives developers and DevOps teams code-level insights into application performance. By presenting that data in personalized dashboards with advanced drill-down, search, and viewing flexibility, Stackify simplifies application troubleshooting and root cause analysis, and speeds mean time to resolution (MTTR). Deployment tracking delivers additional value from development to production environments. To see how Stackify makes optimizing application performance easy and efficient, start your free trial today.
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