Empowering Developers: The Vital Duo of Monitoring and Debugging

Introduction

Debugging and Monitoring go hand in hand for any product and are really crucial part of software development life cycle. Monitoring helps identify issues, while debugging ensures that fixes are implemented to prevent the recurrence of those issues in the future. This duo has served developers for quite some time now.

The Role of Monitoring in Software Development

Monitoring is the diligent process of gathering data and generating insightful reports on a myriad of metrics that delineate the overall health of a system. This meticulous collection of data serves multifaceted objectives, including:

• Measuring performance against established targets and standards
• Identifying deviations from expected results and to make necessary adjustments
• Providing feedback to process owners and stakeholders on the effectiveness of processes and on areas for improvement

Monitoring plays vital role in ensuring system stability, performance and reliability. It gives you an overview of how your system is behaving and on deviation from normal behaviour alerts you about this.

Although there are thousand of metrics collected by monitoring systems but most commonly used one’s are:

• CPU Utilisation
• Memory Usage
• Disk I/O
• Network Traffic

All these can help you quickly identify deviation of your system from normal behaviour, pointing to some issue of application running on this system. This help in avoiding potential big issue which might bring down the complete system.

The Significance of Debugging in Software Development

Now that we know that somethings is wrong with our systems we start digging into the issue. In this process of debugging, logs are like our single source of truth and first place to go to if something is wrong with system.

Although logs will have information about what went wrong but, searching the desired log is like looking for needle in a haystack. But don’t worry we at CtrlB have got you covered. Our CtrlB Flow allows you to search through Petabytes of data hastle free. Sounds interesting? Ping us at support@ctrlb.ai

Problems with Monitoring & Debugging

Although these 2 have served developers really well for years but, after introduction of distributed systems following this approach started lack behind. Pinpointing the issue became real pain for developers.

This problem led to innovation of new concept known as Observability. It was addition on top of existing system and worked on basic principle of 4 signals namely Metrics, Alerts, Logs and Traces (MALT)

Observability: The Intersection of Monitoring and Debugging

Observability was not completely new concept but, just addition to existing process. It introduced concept of traces which made debugging in distributed system much easier. Traces helped in tracking down complete path of a request, in-turn helping developers to debug faster.

Traces were introduced to become helping hand to logs and metrics. It helped developers to pinpoint which metric and log to look into to get idea of whats wrong with the system.

Tools and Technologies for Monitoring and Debugging

Introduction of observability introduced a whole new set of tools that can be used for monitoring and debugging each providing it’s very own flavour. But here are most renowned names which have set standard for each of there pillars of observability:

For Traces: Although there are log of tools available working with traces but the tool that does exceptional job in it is, Jaeger

For Metrics: Metrics are not a new concept and so is this tool. It has been in market for quite some time and has been defacto standard. It is none other than Prometheus.

For Logs: Logs is something that has various options too but what has served for various years now is the ELK Stack

Conclusion

To sum up, monitoring and debugging play critical roles in software development. Observability revolutionizes these processes, integrating metrics, logs, and traces seamlessly. Leveraging tools like Jaeger, Prometheus, and the ELK Stack, developers can tackle challenges in modern software architecture with agility and precision.