Application APM platform setup

Your applications work well... right? And you're sure of that? This is where APM comes in!

More information

I've seen people not think about day 2 concerns of development nearly enough as they should. It is not enough to just ship some software and get paid, you also need to think about keeping it running in the future. Not just that, but you need to know just how well the software is running, as well as have the ability to anticipate any potential issues ahead of time.

What I did

This is precisely where APM, in addition to analytics and more traditional monitoring, like Zabbix, can all come in handy. In regards to applications in particular, setting up an APM platform like Sentry or Apache Skywalking can be great choices, because of being able to look into any of your application instances, to see how they perform.

What I learnt

Initially, I looked into setting up Sentry instead of Skywalking, but the former had far too many components to be able to reliably run it on-prem with limited resources, which was particularly relevant in regards to development environments. Either way, I'm of the opinion that most APM solutions out there are a great value add - since installing Skywalking it has helped me both identify numerous issues both in any of the internal as well as the production environments, oftentimes after the fact and in cases where log output alone wouldn't be enough.