How do I debug and monitor my SaaS applications?
Doing testing properly is one of the most important things in the SaaS phase, sometimes we often don’t understand the problem at first until it becomes a big issue in production.
We also don’t want to launch any SaaS that has bugs and loopholes in them, it’s better to take some extra time to solve these issues and then launch a good product in the market. Let’s see how we can be proactive in finding bugs and fixing them before they create an issue.
But before we start, if you are considering launching a SaaS application but are confused about where to begin or what might cost, then in that case you’ll find invaluable insights in my latest book. I’ve put my years of experience into a comprehensive guide that covers everything from finding a SaaS idea to developing a fully functional product and scaling it.
First, let’s talk about manual testing,
In manual testing whenever a feature is resealed or bugs are fixed you go inside the application and test the functionality manually. You can either do this by yourself or you can take the help of someone else who has a 3rd eye on your SaaS.
To do this I have a template that I use on Google Sheets, you can find the same here and have a copy for yourself.
The problem with this approach is it’s all manual and requires time and energy.
The other way around is to use some kind of testing software like Jam.dev and Logrocket. These software are interconnected to each other and you can directly plug it into your application. So whenever someone even your users uses your application and something crashes you would be able to backtrace it with the help of Screenshots to see the exact point where the error occurred.
On top of this if you like to track your user behavior on your application and want to analyze their heatmap signatures you can use software like HotJar for these.
Now let’s see how can we monitor our backend code and the infrastructure and see the alarms accordingly.
I use Site 24x7 for monitoring my infrastructure and there performance, it has an easy connection with Azure and we can set the alarms directly up there. Earlier I used to use NewRelic but it was costing me a bit more, but if you want to go much deeper you can have an open-source system like Grafana deployed to your servers to monitor things. Other than this for backend code specifically I also tried Sentry it helps at which part the code is breaking and how.
Apart from this software I also write tests using Node JS libraries like Mocha and Jest JS. Earlier I was using Jest JS now I use Mocha.
For networking and managing the traffic source on the application, I use Cloudflare and Google Analytics.
You can also try using the same approach and software for your SaaS testing, so you can effectively solve the issues and have no downtime with your SaaS.
I have also written a book on marketing if you want to take a deep dive into marketing and know how to get long-term paying customers for your SaaS, “Marketing Strategies to Grow Your SaaS” which will cover all the necessary steps and strategies in depth to help you take your SaaS from scratch and get some real paying users.
