Monitoring

Once an application runs in production, “real” users could interact with it in ways that could lead to unexpected bugs or performance issues. Such incidents are a natural by-product of running software in production. The time it takes to identify and solve such issues is the key distinction point between products. Application, error, and uptime monitoring tools provide the team with the required information to identify issues in real-time and devise robust solutions.

Application Monitoring

Application monitoring tools are used to gather performance information on the application, e.g., memory allocation, disk usage, network bandwidth, database query time, etc.

While most cloud providers have built-in metrics dashboards, the team complements those with one of the following tools:

• AppSignal
• NewRelic

Error Monitoring

Error monitoring tools are dedicated to recording errors with in-depth information (e.g., user’s environment, number of occurrences, etc.) and provide tooling to triage and address them.

The team generally uses one of the following tools:

• Sentry
• Firebase Crashlytics

Uptime Monitoring

Uptime monitoring tools are dedicated to checking if a Web application is up and running. The checks are performed automatically at a fixed interval (e.g., every 10 minutes). Their sole purpose is to send alerts when a service fails or recovers.

The team generally uses one of the following tools:

• Freshping
• Checkly
• Pingdom