Monitoring an Application
In today’s fast-paced digital world, ensuring the health, performance, and reliability of applications is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Application monitoring provides real-time visibility into how applications behave, helping teams detect issues before they impact users. Whether you’re running a web application, a backend API, or an enterprise system, monitoring helps prevent downtime, optimize performance, and improve troubleshooting efficiency.
This guide will walk you through how to monitor an application effectively, covering logs, metrics, and application performance monitoring (APM). We will explore different use cases where monitoring is essential, such as web applications, APIs, microservices, and enterprise software.
Defining Use Cases
Before diving into the technical aspects of application monitoring, it’s important to define where and why monitoring is needed. Different types of applications have unique monitoring requirements, and understanding these helps in selecting the right tools and strategies. Below are some common use cases where logs, metrics, and APM play a crucial role.
Web Applications
Web applications, such as e-commerce platforms, SaaS solutions, and content management systems, require monitoring to ensure smooth user experiences and high availability. Common challenges are slow page load times, failed transactions and security vulnerabilities.
Key monitoring aspects:
Logs: Track HTTP requests, errors, and database queries
Metrics: Monitor response times, traffic spikes, and resource utilization
APM: Trace user interactions and identify performance bottlenecks
APIs & Microservices
Modern applications often rely on APIs and microservices to communicate across distributed systems. Monitoring these services ensures that dependencies don’t introduce failures. Common challenges are latency issues, failed API calls and inter-service communication failures.
Key monitoring aspects:
Logs: API request/response logs, authentication failures
Metrics: Request rates, error rates, and service latency
APM: Distributed tracing to track requests across multiple services
Enterprise Applications
Large-scale ERP, CRM, and business intelligence applications are critical for daily business operations. Monitoring helps ensure that these systems run efficiently without disruptions. Common challenges are slow report generation, integration failures and SQL query performance issues.
Key monitoring aspects:
Logs: Track user activity, data synchronization logs
Metrics: Database query execution time, CPU and memory usage
APM: Detect bottlenecks in application workflows
Mobile & IoT Applications
Mobile and IoT applications generate vast amounts of data and require continuous monitoring to detect connectivity issues, crashes, and performance problems. Common challenges are network instability, app crashes, sensor data inconsistencies.
Key monitoring aspects:
Logs: Crash reports, API call failures
Metrics: Battery consumption, latency in data transmission
APM: User session tracking and performance monitoring
Logs: Collecting & Analyzing Application Logs
Application logs provide critical insights into system behavior, errors, and performance issues. Effective log collection and analysis help troubleshoot problems, enhance security, and optimize application performance. This section outlines how to collect, ship, and analyze logs in both Windows and Linux environments.
Before setting up log collection, it's important to understand the types of logs your application generates:
System Logs: Logs from the operating system (e.g., Windows Event Logs, Linux Syslog).
Application Logs: Logs created by the application (e.g., web server logs, API logs, database logs).
Security Logs: Logs that capture authentication attempts, firewall activity, and security incidents.
Audit Logs: Logs that track user actions and changes in the application for compliance purposes.
Collecting Logs with Logit.io
To collect logs we typically recommend using Filebeat. Filebeat is a lightweight, open-source log shipper designed to efficiently forward and centralize log data. It monitors specified log files, reads new entries in real time, and securely transmits them to various destinations
Click here to read more information about Filebeat and learn how to start sending logs to Logit.io.
Metrics: Tracking Performance Indicators
Application metrics provide quantifiable insights into system health, performance, and resource utilization. By monitoring key metrics, you can identify bottlenecks, detect anomalies, and optimize efficiency before issues impact users.
Effective monitoring requires tracking different types of metrics, including:
System Metrics: CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O, network activity.
Application Metrics: Request rate, error rate, latency, database query performance.
User Experience Metrics: Page load time, API response time, session duration.
Business Metrics: Conversion rates, transaction success rates, customer churn.
Collecting Metrics with Logit.io
We recommend several different Telegraf plugins depending on what metrics you want to send to Logit.io.
To send Basic System Metrics (CPU, Memory, Disk, Network) we recommend using the System Metrics plugin, click here to find out more information about the System Metrics plugin and how to set it up.
To send Web Application (API & Request) metrics we recommend using the NGINX plugin, click here to find out more information about the NGINX plugin and how to set it up.
To send Database (SQL & NoSQL Monitoring) metrics we recommend using different Telegraf plugin depending on your database type:
For PostgreSQL we recommend the PostgreSQL plugin, click here to find out more information about the PostgreSQL plugin and how to set it up.
For MySQL/MariaDB we recommend the MySQL plugin, click here to find out more information about the MySQL plugin and how to set it up.
For MongoDB we recommend the MongoDB plugin, click here to find out more information about the MongoDB plugin and how to set it up.
APM: Application Performance Monitoring
APM provides the visibility you need to understand how your application behaves under different conditions and loads. It helps you quickly pinpoint performance issues, such as slow database queries, inefficient code paths, or network bottlenecks, and take action before they impact the user experience. By monitoring real-time data, you can optimize performance, reduce downtime, and improve overall application efficiency.
APM typically tracks:
Transaction traces: An end-to-end view of requests from the user to your application, including all relevant services involved.
Error rates: The frequency and types of errors occurring within the application.
Response times: How long it takes for your application to respond to user requests.
Throughput: The number of requests your application can handle in a given time frame.
Application Performance Monitoring with Logit.io
We recommend using OpenTelemetry to send traces to Logit.io. OpenTelemetry is an open-source framework that allows you to collect and export distributed tracing and metrics.
Click here to read more information about OpenTelemetry and learn how to start sending logs to Logit.io.