Microservices are one of the hottest app architectures in the current market. They easily solve some of the most common problems with monolithic and service-oriented architecture. The ability to split your application into multiple smaller components and develop as well as monitor them individually opens up a whole new world of possibilities. However, this also brings with it a new set of problems. Monitoring distributed applications requires thinking outside of the box.

SPOTcon 2022 is an annual conference hosted by Scout APM that empowers developers with solutions that drive leading-edge transformation in application development and observability. This year’s event took place virtually and was an educational couple of days filled with insights into the current and future states of application monitoring and observability. Didn’t make it to SPOTcon 2022 this year? Not a problem! Here’s a recap of everything that went down.

If you are running a website or have a live application, you will have to ensure that the digital experience for your end-user is seamless. That is where Synthetic Monitoring can help. Any bad experience, delay, or even a glitch could hurt your budget. Industry experts unanimously agree that it is best to ensure that the web pages load as quickly as possible.

The scope of the OpenTelemetry project encompasses how telemetry data is collected, processed, and transmitted. The OpenTelemetry project is not involved with how the data is stored, displayed, or used beyond the collection and transmission phases. The OpenTelemetry Collector is an application written in Go.

For this post, we’ll use a small Flask app that allows users to input a city name and they receive the current weather information for that city. We’ll make an API call to openweathermap.org to get the weather information for the city.

Imagine this scenario. Your company has been laboring for months on an application and is finally releasing it. Your team has worked out all the potential issues and has created an all-encompassing project, but something is not right. There is an issue, and your team is getting some much-needed R&R. You come the next day and see a ton of irate emails. You have to go back to the drawing boards to figure out what went wrong before you release a fix. What I explained was a nightmare.

This article will discuss API Monitoring, the definition of APIs and how they would affect your business if there is a failure, and how to protect APIs or your services. Everything on the web is powered by an API nowadays. APIs are an essential part of the web to connect different services that help customers complete their actions. This article will help you understand the importance of API and why API monitoring is a business necessity.

As failures are a common part of any system’s lifecycle - what would be the Root Cause Analysis for this type of problem? If you build and deploy a system, there are high chances that you'll have to deal with a failure in the near future. However, what matters is how you handle such failures. As an organization, you need to have pre-formulated strategies to handle failures as and when they occur.

Containerization and Kubernetes have taken the DevOps world by storm in the past decade. More and more companies have turned to this technology to enhance their deployment workflows and cut costs. Examples like Pokemon Go and OpenAI would not have been feasible without Kubernetes. While Kubernetes is a growing technology in the current times, it comes with a relatively steep learning curve.

Application Monitoring, or Application Tracing, is an important piece of Observability within your application and stack. Application tracing involves installing an API and/or SDK in your application which then instruments, or wraps your application code with other code that measures the time spent in certain areas of your code, and adds important contextual information to the traces.