The Importance of Access Logs in Performance Issue Analysis

An access log is generated by the web server to log the details about the request that it has processed. It logs status code, response time, URL, protocol, size, client IP address, etc., about the request.  Load Balancers will have similar log files created to log the request details. While doing any performance analysis, these logs play an important role. It is being neglected most of the time due to lack of awareness and the usage of APM tools abstracts it from the users by allowing them to focus visually on coarse-grained data instead of fine-grained data. Most people are aware of the application server log but many of them are not aware of the web server/load balancer access log. Most of the time, this log will not be striking in the mind of a person who investigates the problem.

Access logs are available for the below servers while the format for each of them varies:

What Do We Know About Tomcat 9.0

Apache Tomcat is a very popular and preferred industry choice for web application development as a Servlet/JSP container. Apache Tomcat version 9.0 implements the Servlet 4.0 and Java Server Pages 2.3 specifications from the Java Community Process and includes many additional features that make it a useful platform for developing and deploying web applications and web services.

I take this opportunity to summarize some of the new features in Tomcat 9.0 and steps to keep in mind before upgrading from Tomcat 8.x to Tomcat 9.0.

Spring Boot Magic Explained: Embedded Web Servers [Video]

As soon as you develop a web application with Spring Boot, you'll run an embedded web server like Tomcat or Jetty. Embedding these web servers serves as a prime example of how Spring Boot cleverly uses conditions, dependencies (Maven or Gradle), and a bit of code to produce magic that is hard to debug if you do not know what is going on. I highly recommended that you check out the video below if you want to deepen your Spring Boot knowledge.

In this short and practical episode, you will learn: