What?
World 🌎 is booming with mobile and web applications, Everyday those mobile and web applications offer new features to gets many new customers. When these features are offered, it becomes very important that they fit into the app’s ecosystem without causing any big impact on the existing stability of the app. To achieve this goal, we need to use all the tools in our basket. Knowing good error monitoring tools and understanding the practice itself is one way to ensure that stability we seek gets achieved for the app.
Error monitoring represents the practice which ensures monitoring of known and unknown behaviour of the system/app. Sone pe suhaga would be to get the notification on our communication tool whenever something unexpected happens while monitoring the behaviours.
If we combine the monitoring and alerting mechanism together and implement it on the app, we think we will be on the right track of achieving our goal which is to ensure the stability of the app.
As we have defined the What part of the error monitoring, let’s continue forward with Why part. 🚀
Why? 🤔
It Improve Customer Experience 🤯🤯
Good and satisfying customer experience is an important part of software development. So we have to ensure that our application provides the best customer experience possible. If our application may crash sometimes and not work as expected then customers may not prefer to use our application and we will never know why they are not using our application.
Error monitoring helps us to fix those critical issues as quickly as they are identified even if customers don’t report those errors. It will increase customer satisfaction.
It saves your Revenue Loss 💰💰
Let’s assume e-commerce 🛒 web applications with large number of customers. As they are using our web application, It may happen due to critical issues in our application, some functionalities are not working as expected and customers face some runtime failures. This makes our application difficult to use for customers. If we aren't aware about the issue then it will affect more and more customers and also give poor customer experience. Those errors could directly lose customers and affect business revenue.
Error monitoring helps us to fix those critical issues as quickly as they are identified. As a result we can reduce the number of affected customers and provide a smooth and better customer experience. which makes our pocket happy. 🙂
It increase error traceability 🧑💻 🧑💻
Let’s consider we have that same e-commerce 🛒 web applications with shopping carts, search and filtering products features, Where customer can search for products, add items to cart and perform checkout. Consider a scenario where a customer is searching for products and clicking a button to add an item to cart and suddenly getting stuck and can’t process further due to an runtime exception.
To fix these we need to know what actually went wrong and when it happened and how it happened?. If your application has multiple services then it could be difficult for you to find out the root cause of the problem.
With proper Error monitoring in place, When something goes wrong in our application, we can collect useful information about issues like error stack (source of error), URL and IP address and notify immediately to the developer so they can find out the root cause of the issue through error stack and other information and fix it quickly. It will reduce debugging time for developers.
How?
To understand this part of the idea, we can take an example of one web application.
Web applications are generally categorised into two broad components: Frontend and Backend(we are skipping other components like, dev-ops, QA etc for easier understanding). For assuring better stability of applications, we need to monitor both components really well. Let’s see how we can monitor our front-end apps.
Monitoring Frontend Apps
Frontend Monitoring means tracking the issue from the end-user's perspective. Frontend monitoring depends on the user's system configuration or network connections. In order to ensure that our application works smoothly on all devices. We need to monitoring different aspects of the FrontEnd component like,
- UI glitches (UI Responsiveness)
- Network API failure
- Slow running JavaScript code
- Website Errors (For Example Javascript Type Error)
Monitoring Backend Apps
Backend monitoring means monitoring all the parts of the backend system. For example, some of the parts could be,
- Issues with databases (slow query, connection issue)
- Endpoint’s health
- Hardware problems (high memory usage) and many more etc
Now as we know, what we need to monitor, we should use some of the well known and proven tools so that we don’t reinvent the wheel. 😀