What strategies can you use to monitor the health of your deployed application?

1 Define your monitoring goals

Before you start monitoring your application, you need to define what you want to measure and why. For example, you may want to monitor the availability, latency, throughput, and error rate of your application's endpoints, or the resource utilization, memory consumption, and CPU load of your application's servers. These metrics can help you evaluate how well your application is meeting the expectations and needs of your users and stakeholders. You also need to set some thresholds and alerts for these metrics, so that you can be notified when something goes wrong or needs improvement.

2 Choose your monitoring tools

Depending on your application's architecture, platform, and requirements, you may need to use different tools to monitor its health. For example, you may use a built-in or external service to collect and analyze metrics, such as AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, or Grafana. You may also use a logging framework or service to capture and store logs, such as Log4j, ELK Stack, or Splunk. Additionally, you may use an error tracking or reporting tool to identify and debug errors, such as Sentry, Rollbar, or Bugsnag. You should choose the tools that best suit your application's needs and integrate well with your development and deployment workflow.

3 Implement your monitoring code

Once you have chosen your monitoring tools, you need to implement the code that will enable them to collect and send data from your application. For example, you may need to add some annotations, decorators, or middleware to your application's code to expose metrics endpoints, or to configure some loggers, appenders, or handlers to output logs to different destinations. You may also need to add some exception handlers, hooks, or wrappers to capture and report errors to your error tracking tool. You should follow the best practices and documentation of your monitoring tools to ensure that your code is consistent, secure, and maintainable.

4 Visualize and analyze your monitoring data

After you have implemented your monitoring code, you need to visualize and analyze the data that your monitoring tools collect and send. For example, you may use a dashboard or a chart to display the trends and patterns of your metrics, or a search or a query to filter and aggregate your logs. You may also use a report or a notification to summarize and highlight your errors. You should use the features and functions of your monitoring tools to create meaningful and actionable visualizations and analyses that can help you understand and improve your application's health.

5 Troubleshoot and optimize your application

Finally, you need to use your monitoring data to troubleshoot and optimize your application. For example, you may use your metrics to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, scalability issues, or availability problems. You may also use your logs to trace and verify the execution flow, input and output, or configuration of your application. Additionally, you may use your errors to diagnose and fix the root causes, impacts, or consequences of your application's bugs or failures. You should use your monitoring data to guide your testing, debugging, and optimization processes and to ensure that your application meets its quality and reliability standards.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?