Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Diagnosing and finding the root cause of issues is a crucial skill in software development. Software engineers spend the majority of their time reading and understanding existing code. Because of this, knowing how to debug your applications with proficiency will save you time and make you more effective.

When you need to troubleshoot an issue in your Node.js application, logs provide information about the severity of the problem, as well as insights into its root cause. You can use logs to capture stack traces and other types of activity, and trace them back to specific session IDs, user IDs, request endpoints—anything that will help you efficiently monitor your application.

The recent public release of Cycle’s API has already seen all sorts of innovative uses, from automating the deployments of medical applications, to creating customized monitoring services to track specific performance metrics. Everything you can do in the portal can also be accomplished via the API — it’s actually the exact same API we used to build the portal!

AWS Lambda is a service that confuses many people. For that reason, you may be wondering just how it works, and how you’d use it to build a highly scalable event-driven application. As someone who’s presumably no stranger to the internet, you must have seen the terms serverless, function-as-a-service, or AWS Lambda thrown across your screen a few times. Perhaps you’re looking to learn more. If so, you’re in luck.

Sometimes developers are hesitant to include logging due to performance concerns, but is this justified? And how much does library choice affect performance? The team at SolarWinds® Loggly® and myself decided to find out. We ran a series of performance tests on some of the most popular Node.js libraries. These tests are designed to show how quickly each library processed logging and the impact on the overall application. Let’s see how they did!

Winston is one of the most popular and versatile logging libraries for Node.js. With Winston, you can differentiate and redirect your logs to different places depending on their severity or purpose, and ensure there are redundant records in case of any failures or corruption later on. With the Winston 3.0 update, one of the biggest changes is the ability to apply custom formatting to your logs.

Making Node.js applications quick and sturdy is a tricky task to get right. Nailing the performance just right with the V8 engine Node.js is built on is not at all as simple as one would think. JavaScript is a dynamically typed language, where you let the interpreter assign types to variables. If you’re not careful this can lead to memory leaks.

What is the most important feature your Node.js application can have? Do you think it’s having fancy fuzzy logic for your full-text search, or maybe using sockets for real-time chats? You tell me. What’s the fanciest, most amazing and sexy feature you can add to your Node.js application?

Node.js monitoring is a tricky task. There are certain challenges to look out for. Because Node.js is a dynamically typed programming language and single-threaded you give the interpreter and runtime a lot of freedom to make decisions. This can easily result in memory leaks and high CPU loads. Parallel execution is simulated in Node.js by using asynchronous execution of functions. But, if a single function blocks the thread or event queue, the application performance will take a huge hit.