A Comprehensive Guide to Monitoring your Web Applications

Monitoring and ensuring the optimal performance of your web application is crucial for providing a seamless user experience and maintaining the health of your digital presence. At Lunar, we take this responsibility seriously and have compiled a checklist of essential monitoring tools and configurations to help us achieve this goal. These tools assist us in tracking uptime, identifying errors, analyzing performance, and load testing your web application. In this guide, we will walk you through each monitoring tool and how it contributes to the overall health and performance of your web application.

Uptime and client-side performance monitoring (Oh Dear!)

Oh Dear! is a web monitoring and uptime tracking service that plays a vital role in ensuring the reliability and availability of your websites and web applications. It continuously monitors your web assets for various issues, including:

• Uptime: Ensuring your website is always online.
• Performance: Monitoring for any performance bottlenecks.
• Certificate Health: Checking SSL certificates for any problems.
• Broken Links: Identifying broken links on your site.
• Lighthouse: Analyzing your site's performance metrics.
• Cron Jobs: Monitoring any scheduled tasks (cron jobs).
• DNS: Ensuring DNS records are correctly configured.
• Domain Monitoring: Keeping an eye on your domain's health.

Oh dear sends a monthly report to all key shareholders of a project, providing insights into the health and performance of the web application.

As a bonus, you can use Oh Dear! to create realtime availability monitors that are publicly available for endusers.

Error tracking (Sentry)

Sentry.io is a powerful application monitoring and error tracking platform designed to help us identify, diagnose, and fix issues in your software applications. It provides real-time visibility into application errors, crashes, and performance bottlenecks, enabling us to proactively address issues before they affect your end-users. Key features of Sentry.io include:

• Error aggregation
• Stack trace analysis
• Alerting capabilities

We set up a Sentry integration for every project, and configure it to forward errors to our slack communication channels, so we immediately know when something is not working properly and ensures we can start fixing it right away.

Infrastructure monitoring (New Relic)

New Relic is a comprehensive observability and application performance monitoring platform. It provides real-time insights into application performance, user experiences, and system health from a server side perspective.

While Sentry monitors the application code, New Relic focusses on the underlying processes on the server (PHP, MYSQL,...)  and monitors memory usage, queue times and database query times, and apdex scores.

Static code analysis (Aikido)

Aikido is an application security platform designed to secure web applications by offering a comprehensive overview of code and cloud security issues. It enables us to quickly identify and address high-risk vulnerabilities.

Aikido integrates a variety of security scanning tools into one platform, covering aspects like cloud posture management, open source dependency scanning, secrets detection, static code analysis, infrastructure as code scanning, container scanning, surface monitoring, open source license scanning, and malware detection in dependencies. This all-in-one solution simplifies the security management process. We use Aikido to act fast and pro-actively when a new security issue is detected.

Conclusion

Our comprehensive monitoring approach ensures that your web application remains reliable, performs optimally, is secure, and delivers an exceptional user experience. We take pride in proactively identifying and addressing issues, keeping your digital presence in top shape. If you have any questions or need further information about our monitoring process, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Your digital success is our top priority!