In an agile DevOps environment, developers move quickly and often, making small changes in ongoing sprints. Once applications go live, operations teams (and often times, developers themselves) take over performance management and issue resolution, while updates and improvements continue.
Developers and DevOps teams need a continuous flow of information on how each iteration works, fails, or worse – introduces new problems. Application monitoring is essential, and tools do a great job of tracking metrics, so users are keenly aware of when a problem occurs, and most importantly, when a fix is completed.
How your monitoring tool speeds the discovery, identification, isolation, and ultimate resolution is critically important and highly valuable to your developers and DevOps team. Let’s take a look at how Stackify helps you with each step in the process of expediting application issue resolution.
The Stackify Web Apps overview page provides a sortable list of all applications monitored with accompanying metrics. This summary gives you a snapshot of application health with Stackify’s proprietary App Score, number and frequency of requests, errors, poor performing code, alerts, and much more.
The user-configurable overview page lets you prioritize the metrics that help you identify and resolve issues fast. Page views can also capture data on less critical issues for trend analysis, enabling you to spot areas in your applications for potential optimizations or identify the need for preventative actions.
Visibility into the right metrics makes application problems easier to resolve and proactively prevent. From your Web Apps overview page, you can hop directly into the application dashboard for further troubleshooting. Each application dashboard supports advanced search and drill-down capabilities and includes tabs with more granular metrics. The performance or APM+ tab, for example, provides interactive graphs that reveal aggregated data across an entire application by simply hovering your cursor over sections.
By providing easy access to the data you need most and the ability to instantly hop from metric to log to trace views, Stackify puts you well ahead of the curve for speedy issue resolution.
The key to rapid response is contextualized data, and Stackify provides multiple ways for you to get the data you need. Putting context around data delivers actionable insights, but the sheer volume of data available on application dashboards and tabs can be overwhelming. To ensure easy access to the data you need most, each application dashboard includes a highly configurable monitoring tab.
Monitoring tabs support standard server specifications – CPU usage, uptime, memory, disk space utilization, etc. – along with a broad range of metrics relative to the languages and frameworks you use. When you have a particular query in a specific application that calls a critical database or search engine, you can easily personalize monitoring tab performance graphs with the data you consider critical.
Another troubleshooting timesaver that expedites issue resolution is creating custom dashboards with only the key metrics you set up to track. For example, experienced developers and DevOps professionals know that applications and programming languages have their own strengths and weaknesses. Armed with this knowledge, you can set up a dashboard to easily track and identify the data you know will expedite troubleshooting for applications created in specific languages.
Stackify also provides an API that literally tracks functions to specific spots in your code. By setting up tracked functions, Stackify will record performance data for a single function call in your app. In addition, you can configure Stackify to monitor third-party web services, which are a common source of issues with modern web applications.
Keep in mind that the ability to capture and parse information for all possible data points can easily lead to excessive noise and alert overload. Over-monitoring can desensitize teams to all alerts, which can result in ignoring important issues. Speedy resolution also relies on the right personnel getting alerts and notifications accurately the first time.
Stackify helps reduce alert noise with flexible configuration options that allow for fluctuations in usage patterns without triggering alerts. For example, you can set up custom thresholds for peak usage times when you know an application pushes normal limits without causing failures. Stackify also integrates with Jira, Jenkins, Slack, email, SMS, and other tracking and messaging services to ensure the right people are notified in a timely manner or have trouble tickets automatically created in other systems for additional tracking.
Fixing application performance issues fast requires accurate root cause analysis. With full transaction tracing, Stackify identifies the exact area of code causing each problem. Tracing the flow of every transaction, Stackify breaks down each step of every request. The performance pop-up window gives you instant access to code-level insights inside problem areas for fast issue remediation. Stackify’s lightweight code profiler requires very low overhead, which is ideal for production, as well as development, QA, and staging environments.
Application monitoring tools continue to evolve, as the pace of change for application delivery accelerates. Keeping an eye on application performance and service delivery is important before, during, and after every deployment. And how fast a monitoring tool helps you identify and resolve issues is among the greatest benefits these tools can deliver.
Stackify is designed for use throughout the life cycle of your applications, because resolving issues in pre-production environments is the best way to prevent issues from impacting users in the first place. To see how easily Stackify keeps customers happy and internal users productive with optimal application performance, start your free trial today.
Stackify's APM tools are used by thousands of .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, & Ruby developers all over the world.
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