Are you curious about how your web app is performing? Ever wanted to have real-time insights into your application’s health and optimize its performance for variable workloads to improve performance, hosting-related costs, and user experience?

Node.js is one of the most popular frameworks for server-side programming. As it's based on JavaScript, it's easy to learn and widely used by both enterprises and startups. However, Node.js applications can be prone to issues like memory leaks and high CPU loads due to its dynamically typed, single-threaded nature. This makes performance monitoring crucial for Node.js applications.

Node.js is an open-source runtime environment, frequently used for backend development, and enables developers to build scalable, high-performance apps that can easily handle a vast amount of simultaneous connections. The solution is suitable for network applications scalable for real-time web apps, RESTful APIs, microservices, and chat apps.

The widespread adoption of Node.js continues to grow, making it a prime target for XSS, DoS, and brute force attacks. Therefore, protecting your Node application from possible vulnerabilities and threats is crucial. In this guide, we'll uncover common security threats and explore best practices for preventing them. You don't have to be a cybersecurity expert to implement fundamental security measures for your Node.js application. So, are you ready? Let's go!

This architecture allows Node.js to handle thousands of concurrent connections with low overhead, making it highly efficient for building high-performance web servers and microservices. With many such systems adopting microservices and going for a distributed architecture, the necessity to monitor them has also increased. It is difficult to monitor every transaction and how it interacts with other services, so a distributed tracing system deserves a lot of attention here.

When deploying a Node.js function in the cloud, you might initially think of traditional methods involving web servers and other infrastructure. However, if your application suddenly faces a surge in traffic—thousands or even millions of requests—it could crash if it's unable to handle the load. This is where AWS Lambda shines. AWS Lambda allows developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers.

Logging is essential in Node.js for tracking errors, monitoring performance, and debugging issues. Traditional node.js logging methods, like using console.log(), are often insufficient due to unstructured, cluttered logs that are hard to read. They lack features like log levels, proper formatting, and efficient storage management. Best practices for logging ensure logs are useful, structured, and manageable. Implementing these best practices is crucial for several reasons.

We are delighted to announce the alpha release of the Elastic OpenTelemetry Distribution for Node.js. This distribution is a light wrapper around the OpenTelemetry Node.js SDK that makes it easier to get started using OpenTelemetry to observe your Node.js applications.

AppSignal now offers Apollo Gateway support, giving you span-level gateway performance insights to enhance Apollo Gateway performance in your Node.js applications. In this blog post, we'll give you a whistle-stop tour of how to instrument and monitor Apollo Gateway requests in your Node.js application.