There’s an app for everything these days. Over the past decade, applications have quickly become a mainstay in daily life with their vast, amazing capabilities. They help business run smoothly, help us keep in touch with friends or family, and can even tell us when we get a good night’s sleep.
However, an app is only usable when it functions as it should. If your app runs haywire, it can quickly harm the reputation of your organization. This makes monitoring your application’s performance vital to a positive end user experience.
Monitoring your app is easier said than done, however. There are a variety of tools available, with each serving a different purpose for the myriad of functions taking place behind the scenes. Here are the best practices when it comes to application performance monitoring.
All About Java
If your app runs on Java, then performance metrics and code-level insights are critical. Using professional tools can help you keep vital information in one, easy to read place.
These tools act as live monitoring software as they trace requests across processors and data centers. They also allow you to dig into the root cause of issues, fixing them quickly to provide a better user experience.
Transaction Tracing
On a deeper level, transaction tracing follows what the code for your app is doing in real time as well, but with added error logging. These tools help you identify what dependencies your code calls upon, any URL request info, logging statements and application errors.
Detailed information on these metrics can help you to quickly identify the source of a problem within in your code. From there, you can employ the help of other tools for further clarification or fix an error yourself.
APM – Code Level Performance Monitoring
APM tools are tasked with reporting detailed data back to you, explaining why your application might be running slow or not working properly. Data is compiled from response times, user satisfaction, and requests. An APM can identify slow and most used SQL queries and transactions as it is shown in this resource: https://stackify.com/what-is-apm/, as well as monitor the performance of specific SQL queries.
Logging
Centralize your logs is critical these days. By using a log aggregation, searching, and monitoring tool, you can view full text with support for structured logging. This helps you to find a specific error quickly amongst the sea of text many coders are faced with.
A proper logging tool can also allow you to set up specific log searches that take place every few minutes, which alert you if anything is found. You’ll find support for these logs from common frameworks such as log4net or Nlog.
Error Tracking
With an error tracking tool, your log files can be sent to you directly via email. This eliminated the tedium of searching through a folder you otherwise never look at. Plus, any errors are brought to the forefront of your attention.
In most cases, error trackers can send you logging statements within the same web request and a complete transaction trace. This adds context to the error at hand, making a fix much simpler.
Proper Monitoring
There are plenty of tools out there that individuals use to employ best practices in application monitoring. These are a few of the tools you and your team can take advantage of to ensure the best end user experience possible each and every time.
