Blog: new article "Lean app monitoring—The Starter Pack"

content/blog/lean-monitoring/index.md

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+---
+title: Lean app monitoring—The Starter Pack
+description: An easy, low-cost way to start your monitoring routine that covers the most basic needs. For those who lost in application monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, uptime monitoring, etc.
+thumbnail: thumbnail.png
+author: Denis Stebunov
+date: 2025-01-16T14:37:00+0200
+---
+
+Imagine an e-commerce solution that went down right before Black Friday!
+Downtime or failures could result in disaster, so they should be noticed
+and fixed ahead of time. But deciding what to monitor can be challenging
+when there are so many options. In this article, we’ll explain different
+metrics and share an easy, low-cost way to start your monitoring routine
+that covers the most basic needs.  
+
+If you’re looking for a quick recipe for a new project,
+skip to [**The Starter Pack**](#the-starter-pack). Or, bear with us and learn
+more about potential choices.
+
+Let’s say a site is unavailable. The developers might release a new update
+and shut it down during the rollout, or the cloud infrastructure provider
+could experience a major failure, leaving its servers offline. Anyway,
+downtime must be detected and eliminated.
+
+But just because the site looks like it is working doesn’t mean it really
+is. Errors could go unnoticed, but still be there. Imagine how frustrating
+it would be to spend a long time finding something you want in an online
+store only to realize in the end that you can’t pay for it—because of a bug!
+
+One way to be notified about problems is to get feedback from users.
+Unfortunately, frustrated users might just leave without providing
+any feedback— and never come back. 
+
+The good news is that there is a better way to make sure things will work
+as expected—automated app monitoring. 
+
+## So many things to be monitored!
+
+In large, mature projects, everything has to be monitored, and for a good
+reason—there are many things that could go wrong. So, how should we tackle
+this task? Here’s a list of monitoring metrics:
+
+### Infrastructure monitoring
+
+Infrastructure monitoring tracks servers’ uptime and resource
+allocation. These metrics show that the server is up and running
+and that the app uses resources efficiently without memory leaks,
+disk space shortages, or CPU overload. 
+
+Modern cloud providers offer extensive infrastructure metrics,
+simplifying the monitoring process. 
+
+![Infrastructure monitoring](infrastructure-metrics.png)
+
+### Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
+
+Application Performance Monitoring services track application-specific
+metrics, such as the number and types of requests it handles,
+response time, error rate, etc. These metrics provide an overview
+of the app's performance and possible optimization points.
+
+![Application Performance Monitoring](apm-metrics.png)
+
+### Error monitoring
+
+This type of monitoring service specializes in collecting
+crash reports. Analyzing exceptions thrown by the application
+helps the team detect and fix bugs that have reached production. 
+
+Besides bugs in the code, crash reports can indicate other problems,
+such as infrastructure issues, third party service outages, or
+unexpected changes in external services' behavior.
+
+![Error Monitoring](error-metrics.png)
+
+### Uptime monitoring
+
+Some problems may go unnoticed by infrastructure and application monitoring.
+For example, if our hosting provider experiences a major outage, we probably
+won’t get any alert from our internal monitoring, yet the app will be down.
+The same situation might happen if the app is deployed incorrectly.
+
+That’s why we need to check if the website is available from the user’s
+perspective in different locations. 
+
+![Uptime monitoring](uptime-metrics.png)
+
+### Business metrics
+
+Aside from purely technical things, we also need to keep an eye on
+what is valuable for each business. For example, for media websites,
+page views matter; for an e-commerce store, it’s about order volume;
+for a SaaS app, it's about active users, revenue, and customer churn. 
+
+Business metrics are an additional monitoring layer to check for
+anomalies and hidden problems that are not identified by other tools.
+For example, a sudden drop in orders in an online store could force
+the development team to investigate any issue thoroughly, even if
+other error checks are overlooked.
+
+![Business metrics](business-metrics.png)
+
+## The Starter Pack
+
+Once again, in mature applications everything has to be monitored.
+However, the teams behind these apps didn’t get there in one big step, all at once.
+Improving monitoring capabilities is an ongoing process. However,
+starting a new project still requires a first step. 
+
+Based on our experience, reaching a reliable and stable production
+for most new projects is possible using **the Starter Pack: 
+error monitoring plus uptime monitoring**.
+
+![Uptime monitoring and Error monitoring](thumbnail.png)
+
+Why these two? Because they are relatively easy to implement,
+and they provide decent coverage. 
+
+And this is how it works: an error monitoring service catches exceptions
+and regressions as they occur. It also sends messages to the team chat,
+helping devs get detailed information about the problem. However, if the
+application fails to start, it won’t report anything because there’s no
+application running to throw errors. This is where an external monitoring
+tool comes into play. It checks whether specific web pages or API endpoints
+for the service are available.
+
+To summarize, all types of monitoring exist for good reasons, and as the project
+matures, you shouldn’t hesitate to invest in better production monitoring. However,
+uptime and error monitoring give just enough reassurance to launch a new project
+for the first time, knowing it will be reliable and stable enough.