As APIs play a crucial role in connecting modern cloud applications, monitoring their availability and performance is a must if you want to provide a top-notch experience. A good API monitoring tool will help you build reliable APIs by identifying and resolving the issues before they reach your users. If you’re interested in such a solution, look no further. In this article, we reviewed some of the best API monitoring tools and services available today, both open source and commercial.

Monitoring systems help DevOps teams detect and solve performance issues faster. With Docker and Kubernetes steadily on the rise, it’s important to get container monitoring and log management right from the start. This is no easy feat. Monitoring Docker containers is very complex. Developing a strategy and building an appropriate monitoring system is not simple at all.

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.

Monitoring the performance of an application is not a strange concept to most developers. At one point or another, we’ve all had to do some performance debugging of our own. Usually, it happens when there’s a big issue affecting the user’s experience or cost implications. Only then do we make time to look at how the app performs in different scenarios. Of course, there are different parts of the application that you can, and should, monitor separately.

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.