Distributed tracing enhances observability by providing detailed insights into the performance, behavior, and dependencies of your distributed system. It empowers you to proactively identify and resolve issues, optimize performance, and deliver a reliable and high-performing application.

As part of my work as a Head Nerd, I have the pleasure of meeting with MSPs from all over the world. About a month ago, I was speaking with four technicians from a global MSP based out of California. They were very technically savvy, had a deep understanding of PowerShell, and had a huge emphasis on automation in their business.

While a GraphQL API may be less susceptible to the common REST API performance issues of under and over-fetching data, allowing users to request and receive a wide range of data in a single, nestable query can also come with performance risks. AppSignal for Elixir now supports Absinthe out of the box, and automatically adds Absinthe spans to your app's metrics. AppSignal also automatically instruments Ecto, giving you insights into your application's queries.

One of the most effective ways to monitor a critical user flow on a website—or monitor the operation of a critical API that other applications depended on—is to adopt synthetic monitoring. Synthetic monitoring is an approach to monitoring websites and applications that simulates the actions of real users via browser automation. It mirrors the actions that a visitor may take on your website, say browsing an online shop, adding items to a shopping cart, and then checking out.