Log management stopped being a very simple operation quite some time ago. Long gone are the “good old days” when you could log into the machine, check the logs, and grep for the interesting parts. Right now things are better. With the observability tools that are now a part of our everyday lives, we can easily troubleshoot without the need to connect to servers at all. With the right tools, we can even predict potential issues and be alerted at the same time an incident happens.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that website speed is important to your viewers. It’s the first thing they experience after accessing your website. Your website speed is like an unsung hero that you don’t really notice when it works the way it should, but the second it doesn’t live up to the expectations of your users, they will immediately notice it.

Nowadays, most applications we build are composed of microservices and distributed in nature. In such a setup, communication between these microservices is crucial, but can, unfortunately, cause some headaches. The first thing I check when I’m troubleshooting a bug in production is inter-service communication. Having a reliable tool at your disposal to take care of this can reduce a lot of stress. RabbitMQ, a hybrid messaging broker, is one such tool.

Troubleshooting issues in your applications can be a complicated task requiring visibility into various components. In the worst-case scenario, to understand what is happening and why it is happening you will need metrics, logs, and traces combined together. Having that information will give you the possibility to slice and dice the data and get to the root cause efficiently. In this article, we will focus on logs and how to configure logging for your Java applications.

Logging is a crucial part of the observability of your Java applications. Combined with metrics and traces gives full observability into the application behavior and is invaluable when troubleshooting. Logs, combined with metrics shortens the time needed to find the root cause and allows for quick and efficient resolutions of problems.

When it comes to troubleshooting application performance, the more information you have the better. Logs combined with metrics and traces give you full visibility into your Java applications. Logging in your Java applications can be achieved in multiple ways – for example, you can just write data to a file, but there are far better ways on how to do that, as we explained in our Java logging tutorial.

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.

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.