Monitoring distributed systems like MongoDB is very important to ensure optimal performance and constant health. But even the best monitoring tool will not be efficient without fully understanding the metrics it gathers and presents, what they represent, how to interpret them, and what they affect. That’s why it is crucial not only to collect the metrics but also to understand them.
HAProxy is generally the frontend layer of your application, which means it plays a critical role since all traffic first lands on this layer. Because of this, you need to make sure everything is working at this layer all the time, as any issue can directly impact your business. Therefore, having visibility on this layer is crucial. Visibility can come from two aspects: the metrics HAProxy emits and the logs it generates while handling requests.
Redis is an open-sourced, BSD 3 licensed, highly efficient in-memory data store. It is used widely in the industry because of its incredible performance and ease of use. It can easily be used as a distributed, in-memory key-value store, cache, or message broker. It can hold virtually any data structure, making it highly versatile. Redis was architectured and developed with speed in mind and designed to keep all the data in memory.
Logs are a critical aspect of any production workload, as they give you insight into what is happening in your system and tell you which components may be having issues. The traditional method of looking at logs involves basic Linux commands like tail, less, or sometimes cat.
MongoDB is a cross-platform NoSQL database that uses JSON-like documents with optional schema to store data. It was designed for high availability, high performance for high-data persistance use cases, and automatic scaling. Of course, all with the right infrastructure in mind. It is usually a good choice for document-oriented use cases when you need quick prototyping or massive scale. With the massive scale comes massive traffic, though.
Staying in control of your users’ digital experience and their level of satisfaction is the most important thing you can do as a software-based business. Yet, that’s impossible to do without a monitoring strategy and tools that enable you to visualize how customers interact with your app or website from their perspective.
