Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Knowing how your users interact with your web application and how they experience it is crucial to provide the best possible experience. So what do you need to know? Start with metrics such as page load times, HTTP request times, and core Web Vitals – time to the first byte, first contentful paint. If you use Sematext Experience you’ll see a number of other useful metrics for your web applications and websites there. However, metrics themselves are only a part of the whole picture.

If you’re a RabbitMQ user, chances are that you’ve seen queues growing beyond their normal size. This causes messages to get consumed long after they have been published. If you’re familiar with Kafka monitoring, you’ll call it consumer lag, but in RabbitMQ-land it’s often called queue length or queue depth.

Getting visibility into your application is crucial when running your code in production. What do we mean by visibility? Primarily things like application performance via metrics, application health, and availability, its logs should you need to troubleshoot it, or its traces if you need to figure out what makes it slow and how to make it faster. Metrics give you information about the performance of each of the elements of your infrastructure.

Don’t you hate it when you see an uncaughtException error pop up and crash your Node.js app? Yeah… I feel you. Can anything be worse? Oh yeah, sorry, unhandledRejection I didn’t see you there. What a nightmare you are. 😬 I maintain all Node.js open-source repos at Sematext. A few of them can help you out with error handling, but more about that further down. Here at Sematext, we take error handling seriously! I want to share a bit of that today.

APIs have become the de-facto standard in building and running modern applications. They are an integral part of the automation workflow of any business and as more users rely on your APIs to power their applications, the need for them to be reliable is important. Any degradation in their health, availability, and performance will impact your business, so ensuring its reliability depends on proactively monitoring your APIs.

Let’s say you get an alert that one or more queries is slow. Or that your users complain, whichever comes first 🙂 We’ve all been there… How do you find the root cause for this slowness and then fix it? In this article, I’ll go through my usual thought process: first, I’d try to find which queries are slow. Then, I’d dig deeper: Let’s take a specific example and run through each step.

A large amount of data requires special tools. Apache Cassandra is one of those databases that can handle a large amount of data spread among many commodity servers, providing high availability and fault tolerance without a single point of failure. Developed under the umbrella of Apache Software Foundation, it ensures full visibility into the code base and being free of charge.

Sematext Logs is a Log Management-as-a-service. Think of it as your own central location for logs in the cloud. If you prefer or need to keep logs in your own environment instead of shipping it to the cloud Sematext Enterprise, designed to run on your own infrastructure, makes that possible. You can collect logs from any part of your software stack or infrastructure, IoT devices, network hardware, and much more.

Building SaaS products is hard. Making customers happy is even harder. I should know, I’ve built a start-up that failed! But, not everything is that bad. I learned a lot. Now I maintain a few open-source Node.js projects at Sematext. It’s an observability SaaS. I joined to help make the log management features as good as they can be. If you’ve never heard that term before, my co-worker wrote a great introductory explanation of what Log Management is right here.

Synthetic monitoring has been a staple of performance testing for years now and it’s probably going to stay that way for quite some time. Also called proactive monitoring, this relatively simple way of keeping track of the performance of your website, and is your safest bet to ensure you can rise to your visitors’ expectations.