Modern systems and applications span numerous architectures and technologies — they are also becoming increasingly more dynamic, distributed, and modular in nature. In order to support the availability and performance of their systems, IT operations and SRE teams need advanced monitoring capabilities. This Refcard reviews the four distinct levels of observability maturity, key functionality at each stage, and next steps organizations should take to enhance their monitoring practices.
There are certain industries that greatly benefit from high-performing, low-latency, geo-distributed technologies, while other organizations might be more focused on vertically scaling architectures. This is dependent on numerous factors including the data pipeline, network, data structure, type of product or solution, short and long-term goals, etc. While there are currently many databases and tools that provide vertical scaling capabilities, there are not many that focus on horizontal scaling -- but there’s still a need for both.
Latency
Before jumping into specific industries that benefit from high-performing, low-latency, geo-distributed databases (it’s a mouthful, I know), let’s define a few terms here. High-performing is pretty self-explanatory so I’ll skip over that one. For the next term, I’ll refer to my colleague Jacob Cohen’s blog on Geo-Distributed Databases. Latency generally measures the duration between an action and a response. In user-facing applications, that can be narrowed down to the delay between when a user makes a request and when the application responds to a request. So, technologies that enable low latency usually improve performance and response times, leading to improved user experience and cost savings.
Introduction
Third-party scripts can cause negative load-time effects. Why is this an issue? Well, in Google’s view, a poorly-optimized page should not rank highly. Instead, search results should favor pages with fundamental design strengths — including JavaScript minification, rapid execution time, and render-friendly scripting.
In reflection of this belief, Google has planned the gradual release of a major update to its search algorithm that is scheduled for June through August of 2021. This update will increase the importance of a page’s loading speed as a contributing factor to a web page’s overall ranking on Google’s search results page. As a result, how third-party scripts impact page load times is becoming more important than ever.
The growth in information architecture has urged many IT technologies to adopt cloud services and grow over time. Microservices have been the frontrunner in this regard and have grown exponentially in their popularity for designing diverse applications to be independently deployable services.
Trivia: In a survey by O'Reilly, over 50% of respondents said that more than 50% of new development in their organisation utilise microservices.
Getting Java apps to run is one thing. But getting them to run fast is another. Performance is a tricky beast in any object-oriented environment, but the complexity of the JVM adds a whole new level of performance-tweaking trickiness — and opportunity. This Refcard covers garbage collection monitoring and tuning, memory leaks, object caching, concurrency, and more.
What happens when you page loads too slowly.
Recently we troubleshooted a performance issue, reported by one of the customers of Plumbr who was using our Real User Monitoring solution. While investigating the behavior we stumbled upon a major difference in the time it takes to load a web page in background tabs vs the tabs in the foreground.
To quantify this difference, we investigated 1.8 million user interactions in UI and compared the duration of such user interactions for two subsets:
What's in your walle- I mean, toolbox?
DevOps has been a hot topic for many years, but it's still common for organizations to feel overwhelmed by the complexity of automating their entire infrastructure and to get hung up on which tools to use.
An integrated set of DevOps tools for monitoring has the power to improve visibility and productivity, achieve higher-performing systems, and establish cross-functional collaboration. The right toolset is more than the tools themselves — it’s about developing the culture, discipline, and practices that come to define your product/service and your workplace.
When you build a great product or application, sooner or later, it will be drawing attention more and more users who will expect a flawless, perfect application as the demand grows in the time it handles more and more requests per minute. If we are not prepared for this, the application performance will start degrading, and you will lose your audience and business. In this article, we explain why you should pay attention to when building a scalable application.
What Is Application Scalability?
Application scalability is the potential of an application to grow in time, being able to efficiently handle more and more requests per minute (RPM). It’s not just a simple tweak you can turn on/off; it’s a long-time process that touches almost every single item in your stack, including both hardware and software sides of the system.
This article is intended to be a step-by-step guide, laying out methodology and guidance when solving a performance problem with backend APIs or services. And in using the tools needed, we are able to get to the root cause of performance issues and add monitoring to issues seen in cloud services.
APM Tools
