How to gain and maintain control over your applications
Provide the best experience possible
At Quatronic, we strive to provide the users of our apps with the best experience possible. Although we spend much attention to the design and development of an application, there is always a chance that a user can be confronted with unexpected behavior of the app. What we want to prevent at all cost is that users are unable to use the app and have to abort their daily work because they are running into an unknown error.
Just like every manufacturing facility needs a control room, every IT production environment needs a space where someone can closely monitor the environment’s most important metrics. That’s why we developed our own virtual control room in the form of a monitoring dashboard. This dashboard enables us to monitor important metrics related to the stability of the apps for which we offer technical support.
Metrics
Monitoring metrics enable us to take both preventative and corrective measures. An obvious example of a corrective measure is to go on a bug hunt when we see an increase in error logs, instead of waiting for an end user reporting it.
What creates even more value is to fix problems before they occur. For example, we could decide to archive data when we see the database usage exceeds a certain threshold. We also monitor the percentage of slow requests over time. An increase is reason to investigate which requests are slow and improve their performance before turning into a serious problem.
Currently, we monitor the following metrics. We are constantly adding more metrics to our dashboard to ensure we have a complete picture of how well our applications are running.
- Database utilization
- Number of errors
- Application performance
- Integrations with external systems
Conclusion
In the end, it is inevitable that applications will show unexpected behavior at some point in time. However, our monitoring dashboard allows us to spot the majority of these irregularities as fast as possible. This prevents that a small issue turns into a major error impacting daily operations. The biggest win of it all? Perhaps not the saved costs, but a peaceful state of mind for us and our clients.
