6 Reasons why you need code monitoring for your next project
Today I’ll be talking about code monitoring. What is it and why do you need to start utilizing it? I’m sure I could think of more than 6 reasons to do it, but these are the 6 most important in my eyes.
First of all — What is code monitoring?
“It works on my machine”
If you’re a software developer, chances are you have heard that sentence at least once in your life. And chances are that you’ve experienced a feature that works locally, but not in production. This is one of the reasons code monitoring is a great addition to your code.
Code monitoring is a way for developers or product managers to avoid unexpected incidents, catch errors early and keep your users from using a product that isn’t working.
Some developers don’t feel the need to monitor their code if they’re just starting out with a new project and only feel the need to do it once their project becomes a medium to big-sized project. This is not a good practice in my eyes and can be money and time-costly in the long run.
Therefore I made a list of reasons why you need code monitoring and here are the 6 most important points. Let’s get to it!
1. Solving errors faster
This seems like a no-brainer but is absolutely critical. It’s easier to solve a bug that you know where is than a bug you don’t even know exists. It can take weeks or months before a user emails you about a broken feature. Worst case scenario — they find another product to use and never tell you why.
2. Saving time and money
Imagine your payments are going way down all of a sudden and you have no idea why. Is it the marketing efforts? Is there a better product out there that customers prefer? What is happening? Turns out your payment solution isn’t working properly and you’re not getting any feedback from customers. With monitoring, you would have caught it the first time and combined with step 1, could have solved it in no time, therefore, saving lots of development time and money, and potential revenue.
3. Suspicious activity
If someone or something is trying to break into your software it’s always preferable to see what they’re trying to do and how they’re about doing it. If god forbid, they get in, you know exactly where the breach was and can fix it right away.
4. User behavior
This one is a little different than the others so far but still very important. Maybe you’re building a product with an idea in mind on how to use this product or building all these features you think are critical for success. By monitoring the behavior of your users and seeing what features they’re using and which ones they aren’t you can quickly spot where you should aim your focus moving forward and where you shouldn’t.
5. Automation processes
Let’s be honest. We all love automation. At least I do. Though it’s not always the scheduled cron jobs are working or the server restarts go exactly as planned. By monitoring your automation scripts you can quickly get an idea of how everything is being handled in your code and figure out what and why it failed in the first place.
6. Notifications
Combining all of the above points with mobile push notifications has saved me, and also given me a lot of joy over my career as a developer. There’s no better feeling than getting a notification on your phone when someone is signing up for a paid membership or someone is using that new feature you just shipped. On the other hand, of course, it’s annoying when getting a notification on a Friday night that your server is down and no users can use your product. But I'd rather get it sooner rather than later and it may cost some hours on the weekend, but at least your users are happy and you’re not getting a flooded email inbox on Monday morning.
The monitoring tool I use
There are a lot of different tools to use for monitoring your code. Some work better for small projects, some better for bigger and more enterprise projects. I use myNotifier which is a super lightweight tool that lets you create triggers exactly where you want to. myNotifier is a tool I built myself and tailored for my own needs, to begin with. It slowly grew in popularity and now there are new users signing up all the time that want to help build upon the product with great feature requests and awesome feedback.
Key takeaways
Utilizing monitoring of your code can be extremely beneficial for making sure your code and software run as intended and doesn’t have any errors that could lead to hours of bug finding, annoyed users, or a loss of revenue.
If you have any questions or feedback for this blog post, contact me on Twitter or comment on this post and I’ll respond as soon as possible. Give a follow while you’re at it if you want to hear about updates on myNotifier and be a part of the growth.
Any love in form of claps or comments on this blog post would also be greatly appreciated 😁
Thank you for reading and remember to keep on coding on 💙
All the best,
Jonas A.
