By Durga Prasad Acharya in Sysadmin on September 6, 2022
If you want to improve your applications’ wholesome health, monitoring capabilities are something you must never ignore.
And it makes sense because modern enterprises largely depend on applications to drive their businesses. In the present scenario, application delivery and accelerated service without sacrificing quality mean a lot for your customers.
So, have you ever given a thought as to what will happen if your client systems don’t perform as they have expected?
If no, then think again.
It’s because it affects them and their business to a great extent. Hence, you need to make sure your applications perform superbly to deliver what you had promised or what your users expect.
And how to do this?
Well, you need an efficient full-stack monitoring solution to keep checking the overall health of all your software, applications, and infrastructure to make sure they perform the best.
Full-stack application monitoring is the all-in-one combination of front-end, real-user, synthetic, infrastructure, application stack, and many that help reduces the number of individual tools that you need to keep tracking all the time.
It provides one single source where all your team can leverage to monitor different aspects of your systems effectively and the environment where they run.
Full-stack monitoring entails:
End-user experience
App performance monitoring
Network infrastructure monitoring
Log File monitoring
Most of the platforms offer many features, including below.
Observability
It helps you understand the reason why an application or system behaves in a certain manner. It also makes you learn why a specific issue occurs in your apps in the first place before you could initiate the remedial methods. This way, you can ensure the same mistakes are not repeated that caused the issue.
Detailed metrics
You can see the complete picture of the issues and collect the metrics of your applications. Full-stack monitoring tools correlate application metrics, transaction metrics, and infrastructure metrics to see what’s going on in your apps.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning
Both AI and ML are leveraged to help you learn your apps’ behavioral patterns, analyze them, and alert if something goes wrong. These technologies can predict observation points through smart algorithms, which you can use for capacity planning and other purposes.
Now that you are a bit familiar with why full-stack monitoring is essential for your applications let’s explore some of the best solutions in the market that you can use for effective monitoring.
Zenoss
The full-stack monitoring by Zenoss is AI-driven that lets you optimize your app performance. It’s for multiple environments, which include simple and complex infrastructures in addition to multi-cloud IT deployments.
You can collect and analyze metrics, dependency data, stream data, agent data, logs, and events across modern environments through AIOps. Leverage machine learning and transform the effectiveness and accuracy with dynamic and real-time models of applications and IT services.
You get high speed with the help of a serverless and elastic cloud architecture with smart analytics. The features included in Zenoss are:
Anomaly detection to get the root-case analysis immediately through model-informed ML. As a result, you can quickly isolate problems to prevent losses due to service outages and improve MTTR. With rich reports and dashboards, you can get complete visibility on your service health and collaborate with teams for faster investigation along with problem-solving.
Using the Timeline, you can view your apps and systems’ state and performance status anytime and explore historical information. Utilize real-time models for understanding dependencies, and see the relevant resources as well.
Voting lets you raise key event visibility dynamically through supervised ML and adjust the ranking of vote-related resources.
Prevent IT disruptions by using high-cardinality data and ensuring your ephemeral systems perform the best, reducing digital risks.
With Zenoss, you can enhance Mean-Time-to-Resolution (MTTR) by 85%, accelerate ITOM system automation by 70%, and reduce event storms and alert noise by 99.99%.
Sematext
Use Sematext to map and monitor your entire infrastructure with its tools that you can use in the cloud or on-premise. With numerous cloud-ready integrations, you can collect events and metrics and then report them across your stack by getting an instant view of your cloud and enterprise infrastructure.
Besides, Sematext is quick to get started within minutes with a unique dashboard, anomaly detection, and alerts. You can use context-aware filters to get insights such as tags, network interfaces, disks, and more. Reduce the MTTR by detecting and handling issues sooner, irrespective of where the issues originate from.
Integrate with Elasticsearch, Solr and SolarCloud, Docker, Node.js, Nginx, Express.js, Nginx Plus, MySQL, MariaDB, Apache, Redis, Kafka, Tomcat, Memcache, and many more. For server monitoring, view the present and past metrics regarding utilizing your cloud instances and servers. It includes tracking metrics like CPU, disk usage, memory, load, network, and IO.
Aggregate top-down visibility and utilize visualization for further capacity planning. For cloud and container monitoring, see container-based metrics and correlate them for better problem-solving. You can also parse logs, structure, mask, or enrich them for fast search and flexible reporting.
For database monitoring, you can overview your MariaDB and MySQL’s health for connection details such as aborted clients used connections, etc. You can see threads, cache usage, and open files, incoming and outgoing traffic, query details, select or sort stats, and more.
In addition to this, you can see detailed InnoDB and MyISAM engine statistics and handle table metrics. You can find all the slow database operations for transaction tracing, view SQL statements, and HTTP transactions via multiple tiers.
Get the top ten operations by latency throughput and time consumed, plus filter database by their type. It will visualize your applications in real-time, build NetMaps, and inspect your network topology with your containers and servers for network monitoring.
Sematext collects and auto-discovers communication data, including transmitting and receiving rates in segmented and aggregate by port. You can explore map views with panning, filtering, and zooming, plus filter out unnecessary endpoints.
Moreover, Sematext also provides you with JVM monitoring and profiling to improve your Java applications on-demand and find methods with wall clock time and CPU. Perform inventory monitoring by capturing installation, removal of events details, and updates.
Find vulnerable packages in your containers and servers, compare two machines to find any mismatched packages and other features.
Dynatrace
Monitor your complete application stack using Dynatrace, a single, high-performing platform from multi-cloud to mainframes. It understands everything, which includes end-user experience, infrastructure health, and more.
Dynatrace captures in-context data using only one solution, a single agent, and a common data model. Apart from viewing every component, it also understands how things are connected, such as interdependencies and relationships between layers, codes, and components.
Through real-time user monitoring, session replays, and synthetic transaction monitoring, Dynatrace provides you with a 360-degree overview of every action. Therefore, you can understand customer behavior, optimize their experience, and visualize the effects of raised issues.
Irrespective of your application language, architecture, or type, such as hybrid, on-premise, or cloud, Dynatrace covers you with code-level and deep visibility. You can track all the transactions across different tiers without any blind spots and gaps and traverse from user click to database statement or code-level in seconds.
Dynatrace reaches far beyond the application layer to dive deep into your app infrastructure. Their infrastructure monitoring goes down to the container orchestration layers, virtual infrastructure, and virtual network by giving the full-stack coverage.
This is how it provides observability automatically along with smart alerting and problem detection across hybrid environments and cloud-native. It maps your app’s dynamic environment and discovers interdependencies automatically.
New Relic
View, analyze, and then troubleshoot your full software stack in a single unified and curated platform with New Relic. It monitors your infrastructure health and application performance along with end-user behavior.
Find the actual cause of issues and resolve them fast, and use in-depth transaction information to view the accurate method calls using line numbers such as external dependencies of any complexity and size for your apps.
Get the full picture by clubbing key metrics out of browser apps and mobiles with data stores, supporting services, and hosts. You can view all your infrastructure on-premise, VMs, servers, cloud-native infrastructure, and cloud resources.
After you have the complete insights on these data, you can connect the performance and health of your containers, hosts, services, and resources with the rich app context, configuration changes, and logs. With their serverless monitoring, you can deliver serverless applications with confidence after identifying issues.
Here, Observability and auto-instrument monitoring take place without changing any codes. Combine synthetic, RUM, and native application monitoring to ensure performance and uptime proactively across services, APIs, URLs, and 3rd party resources on mobile and web.
You can improve and benchmark the user experience for your code changes and deployments. Apart from log management, full-stack monitoring also includes Logs in Context. In this, logs are correlated automatically using curated content for traces, errors, and spans to ensure the fastest analysis.
Sysdig
Sysdig offers excellent cloud-scale monitoring along with complete compatibility with Prometheus. It allows the users to maximize the availability and performance of all your cloud applications, services, and infrastructure.
In addition to this, remove silos after unifying information across teams for multi-cloud and hybrid monitoring. Provide your developers with their desired monitoring approach without management headaches. As it is compatible with Prometheus, you can get deeper visibility into your rapidly shifting container environments.
Besides, Sysdig can scale to innumerable metrics with only one backend and long-term retention. The features included under Sysdig cloud monitoring are:
Explore and auto-discover your cloud, container, along with Kubernetes environments. Get complete visibility and data insights to improve app performance.
View events and metrics and alert them across all your systems, such as response time, request count, error count, and latency.
View network connections such as egress and ingress for all the services, processes, pods, etc.
Get unmatched scale with PromQL-based alerts and dashboards for Prometheus monitoring.
Using Sysdig Kubernetes monitoring, visualize your traffic flaws, and identify bottlenecks.
Configure alerting easily across nodes, clusters, namespaces, tags, and metrics
Trigger system call capture for executing offline troubleshoots
Isolate and secure dashboards and data by users, teams, environments, or customers
Save your time using the curated menu of integrations for Prometheus monitoring that offers great support, configuration, and more.
Furthermore, Sysdig is multi-cloud ready, supporting services like Amazon Web Services, VMware, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Rancher, and Openshift. You can try Sysdig free for 30-days and decide whether it is the right choice for you or not.
Conclusion
Monitoring your application stack is essential, so all your applications perform optimally and are safe from the risks of digital attacks, errors, and bugs. Thus, use any of the above mentioned tools that are best suitable for your requirements for monitoring your apps and the entire digital infrastructure.