February 26, 2019
Debugging is an important skill to develop as you work your way up to more complex projects. Seasoned engineers have a sixth sense for squashing bugs and have built up an impressive collection of tools that help them diagnose and fix bugs. I’m a member of Heroku’s Ruby team and creator of CodeTriage and today we’ll look at the tools that I used on a journey to fix a gnarly bug in Sprockets.
February 21, 2019
Behind every application, service, and website is a healthy host. In order for DevOps teams to deliver fast, responsive, and stable applications, they need tools to monitor the performance and stability of these hosts. Monitoring helps teams not only identify problems such as high resource usage and errors, but also detect trends and potential changes in performance. In this article, we’ll show how integrating AppOptics with Loggly helps you identify, troubleshoot, and resolve performance problems.
February 21, 2019
One of the biggest challenges organizations face when operating web applications is monitoring the availability of complex transactions that involve multiple steps. Developers and testers are often left manually stepping through their applications in the hopes of reproducing problems and replicating the complex nature of user experience. What they really need is a way to simulate real user activity independent of any actual users. In this article, we’ll explain how to create and monitor web applications using synthetic transactions.
February 15, 2019
When running any production load within Azure, you need to make sure you are always getting the latest info on what is going within your hosted infrastructure. Logs provide a way to record and monitor the systems that we are running and alert us to any potential problems. The Azure Event Hub messaging system has built-in support for streaming logs out of a large variety of Azure-hosted resources, such as VMs, load balancers, and more.
February 13, 2019
Given that load balancers are responsible for distributing incoming network traffic, their health and efficiency are critical for system availability. In this article, we’ll give you an introduction to load balancer monitoring, review the most important metrics to monitor, and show you how to use them to troubleshoot problems in your website and apps.
February 2, 2019
As web services become more popular in a global environment, the demand for responsive, performant sites have increased. Performance is critical to the success of modern web applications, whether the user is in California or New Zealand. Large companies such as Amazon track their response time, because an increase in response times by one second costs the company $1.6 billion per year in sales. While this seems like a large-scale problem, a Google Study in performance confirms that page response time has a drastic effect on small- to medium-sized sites as well.
February 1, 2019
Database monitoring is a critical part of any application’s maintenance. Finding database issues in time can help the application remain healthy and accessible. Without solid monitoring in place, database outages can go unnoticed until it’s too late and the business is losing money and customers. Like any operational monitoring, databases can be proactively or reactively monitored, with proactive monitoring favored by most people. Proactive monitoring seeks to identify any issues before they become major problems.
February 1, 2019
Back in the day when most languages didn’t support asynchronous functions, and you could follow the control flow simply by reading the code top to bottom, performance tuning was simple. To speed up a process, you had only a few options: make fewer function calls, make the function calls faster, or get better hardware. Now that we’re living in a world where we might process high volumes of requests through asynchronous runtimes, it can be a bit more complicated.
February 1, 2019
DevOps engineers wishing to troubleshoot Kubernetes applications can turn to log messages to pinpoint the cause of errors and their impact on the rest of the cluster. When troubleshooting a running application, engineers need real-time access to logs generated across multiple components. The challenge that engineers face is accessing comprehensive, live streams of Kubernetes log data. While some solutions exist today, these are limited in their ability to live tail logs or tail multiple logs.
January 25, 2019
Uptime checks on the web tell you if a single page is loading correctly and how long it takes. It’s a good start, but users often interact with many pages, going through complete transactions. For example, they might check out in an e-commerce store, book a hotel room, or publish a blog article. A break in any one of those steps leaves customers unable to use your service. To get a deeper look at the user experience, you need to monitor complete transactions.
