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Application monitoring and service metrics

If you don’t track it, you can’t measure it. Realtime service and business metrics should be part of any production application. Knowing how is the app performing is as important as measuring whether the product impact of your changes.

A good set of service metrics lets you effectively monitor the impact of your changes on the app performance. Has your change to multi-threading really achieved the times x throughput? Has the last dependency injection change caused a slow memory leak? Are there levels of response codes you’re not expecting in your app?

I while back I blogged about how to approach error logging in production multi-node environments so that you stay sane. Later on, I looked at a way to deal with application level metrics using statsd.

One last piece of the puzzle is monitoring of the health of the nodes themselves. This typically includes CPU and Memory usage, disk space monitoring and application health monitoring. Diamond collectors are great exactly for that.