Imagine
Imagine a perfect world, with your perfect system, when everything goes fine.
And fine.
More fine
[...]
And then suddenly you have a call from your boss/client/colleague:
Why our button XYZ is so slow? What's going on?
Then you check:
- IIS/apache is fine
- Database is fine
- JavaScript looks like normal
- External functionality is good
So where is the problem? You check XYZ button and it is fine.
So what just happened?
The sad answer: now it is nothing. The problem was 2-3 hours ago and it is gone now. You just spent some of your time completely useless.
The question which suddenly comes to your mind is: what had happened and what changed?
Moreover one more should appear: when it will happen again?
Monitoring
There are a lot of tools, you should use to measure your application:
- Performance counters or JMX - this is the base
- Logs - unfortunate most developers (including myself) create poor quality logs. But quick access to logs is very useful. Moreover try ELK or Splunk enable fast search over history
- Live dashboards - I know that Zabbix or Nagios are old and ugly, but they are damn useful.
- Add more measures to you code with tools like MiniProfiler/Glimpse on .NET or Metric in Java. This can show use easy bottlenecks in our applications. Moreover we can see it live with tools from point 2 and 3.
We are IT, we are lazy, we need tools which will do work for us. Just find what is useful for you and check what your admins use :)
To sum up - remember Sting song :
Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you
