Nobody actually cares about the network. Provocative words coming from a network visibility company, you might be thinking. However, consider what you’re doing right now. You’re reading a blog on a website, maybe clicking around other tabs, possibly streaming some music, and likely keeping an eye on your work chat. These are all applications, and that’s what we all truly care about, not the plumbing that delivers them.
For DevOps teams, delivering quality software has long required reconciling a major tension: In a perfect world, you’d catch every issue in each new release of your application before you deployed the release into production. But in the real world, doing so is tricky, not least because it’s hard to collect data about application performance before the application is actually deployed.
In the present age of cloud-native everything, it can be easy to forget that some applications still run on-premises. But they do and managing the performance of on-premises apps is just as important as monitoring those that run in the cloud. With that reality in mind, here’s a primer on how to approach on-premises application performance monitoring as part of a broader cloud-native performance optimization strategy.
gRPC is an open source Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework developed by Google and released in 2016. Although gRPC is still relatively new, large organizations are adopting it in increasing numbers to build APIs to connect complex microservice meshes that use disparate languages and frameworks. gRPC-based APIs can process requests up to seven times faster than REST APIs, and they also allow customers to easily implement SSL authentication, load balancing, and tracing via plug-in libraries.
In part 1 of our synthetics series, we looked at tracking network performance to drive better business outcomes. Here in part 2 of our series, we’ll dig into the very first and most basic business outcome of using digital experience monitoring (DEM). That is, we’ll look at how to protect and grow revenue by proactively monitoring the health, availability and uptime of your critical applications and services, so you can fix issues before your customers’ experience suffers.
