As cloud computing proliferates enterprise IT, IT teams are under severe pressure to ensure serviceability in a complex hybrid environment. Therefore, SysOps, DevOps and SRE teams are looking at modern application monitoring tools to gain observability in a diverse computing environment spanning multiple on-premises and cloud implementations.
Moreover, with organizations increasingly making the bulk of their application stack available to end-users, application availability and monitoring are more closely tied to customer experience than ever. A single point of failure in the application stack can lead to poor customer experience and consequent loss of revenue. As an application grows in complexity, so does the number of points of failure. Pinpointing the issue becomes an arduous task at a time when one of your critical business processes is in jeopardy.
What does an application monitoring tool do?
Application monitoring tools provide real-time visibility into the health of applications and help identify issues before they impact end users. These tools also help you track changes made to the codebase, understand how those changes impact performance, and quickly roll back changes that break the application.
In a nutshell, application monitoring tools are critical to ensure the availability and serviceability of modern applications. They provide visibility into the performance and health of an application, as well as offering a wealth of performance data that can be used to diagnose and resolve issues.
Application monitoring tools come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but most offer some combination of real-time monitoring, alerts, dashboards, reporting, and log analysis. Many also include features specifically designed for monitoring the performance of web-based applications, among other metrics.
6 features every application monitoring tool must have
The right application monitoring solution will be highly dependent on the specific needs of your organization, but there are six features every application monitoring tool must have.
Application health monitoring
Apprehension is inevitable when going from staging to production. Stringent quality control may elongate the release cycle, affecting your market adaptability and competitiveness. Undiscovered bugs surfacing in a production application is an adverse situation for the development team and publisher.
An application health monitoring tool identifies bugs that your quality team could not and save your users the disappointment of having trusted a seemingly low-quality application.
Flexible deployment
Application monitoring is essential for ensuring that applications meet SLAs and provide a good user experience. The tool that you use to monitor the health of your application must be as flexible as the application itself. Organizations tend to be a little conservative when it comes to the data security of their business applications, and their policies might contain what types of applications they can use. For example, an organization may prefer an on-premises implementation over SaaS for non-customer-facing application. Regardless, the monitoring application should provide various deployment options — SaaS, on premise, or hybrid.
Real-time error detection
When your application is in production and experiences performance degradation, historic data and insights are of little use. You want real-time insights into the errors and crash dumps so that you can react before the situation at your support center deteriorates.
With an interactive ‘error database’ screen, you can filter the incoming stream to a specific environment, version, or type. This versatility helps you pinpoint the situation quicker, understand the urgency of the situation, and take appropriate action. The resulting action could be a rollback, temporary provision or quick resolution.
Smart alerting
Alerting is essential for quickly identifying problems with applications. Application monitoring tools that include alerting functionality can help you quickly identify issues and take action to resolve them before they impact end users.
An application monitoring tool is used by developers, testers, support and business teams. The teams’ areas of responsibility have both overlapping and unique aspects, and the alerting system should reflect those. For example, while a support team has little need for a warning regarding the version of the development framework, it might be critical for the development and testing team. The monitoring tool should make sure they are only receiving the alerts they should.
Detailed insights and stats
A lot can be said about how insightful an application monitoring tool is by looking at the logs it generates. For example, if the application encounters a runtime exception, the same should reflect in the log file and should be easily identifiable amidst large blocks of code. The same goes for stack trace, system info or any custom value.
In addition, the tools must allow you to group logs according to various parameters. For example, LogMill allows you to group logs by the version. Logs are great to gain detailed information on an event. However, sometimes you only need a quick overview of a range of data, such as crash reporting data for the span of a downtime. For example, the monitoring tool should allow you to get visual output on a group of logs sorted by an error code or a cloud test environment.
Enterprise-grade IAM
Modern application monitoring tools offer IAM tools to restrict access to certain logs and data. For example, if you’re deploying a banking application, you likely want to restrict access to a limited number of people in your team during production. The same cannot be said about staging and testing the application.
Application monitoring with LogMill
LogMill is a service that captures any errors or logs from your app to help you make it healthy. It removes the apprehension of taking an application live with production-level performance, which means no more worries about being down for users. LogMill will even tell which services in the applications need some attention.
LogMill is the perfect tool for any project with a team of people working from different locations. The application monitoring app allows you to control who has access and when they can use it, while also allowing collaboration at every level imaginable - whether that be within one department or across multiple departments.
Say goodbye to notifications and alerts flooding over inboxes with its built-in SMTP functionality, as it comes preinstalled.
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