Top Tools for Node.js monitoring

Application developers are turning to Node.js as one of the most popularly used Javascript frameworks for microservice development. Node.js tops the list of most utilized frameworks amongst the developers worldwide in 2020 by 51.4 percent. With the increasing demand for Node.js technology, it has become crucial to monitor the performance of the applications, servers, and other metrics. In this article, we will go through the top 5 Node.js monitoring tools that ensure that your applications are not experiencing performance issues. 

What is Node.js Monitoring?

With Node.js monitoring, APM tools are used to monitor the software application’s performance and availability by finding bottlenecks and fixing errors. 

The Node.js monitoring tools can fix the bugs by analyzing each web result, pointing out the problem at the code level, and tracking down the issues.  

Top 5 Node.js Monitoring Tools

Retrace

Retrace is a well-known cloud-based tool for application performance management. In addition to APM it also offers centralized logs, error and log integration, and basic server metrics. It is  used by organizations of all sized to proactively catch issues before production as well as troubleshoot in crisis mode when issues in production do occur.  This application monitoring tool supports two-factor authentication and single-sign-on.

Retrace offers an activity dashboard where the development team can track the near real-time performance of the code. Dashboards also allow you to monitor web pages like shopping carts and log in pages.

Retrace was built to give developers increased visibility into the performance of their code in testing and production environments.  With Retrace, developers can access APM, centralized logging, code profiling, integrated logs and errors with one platform. With integrated errors and logs providing detailed trace views, developers can easily identify the root cause of performance issues.

Features of Retrace

• Provides error and log integration for quick troubleshooting
• Finds changes after deployments and validates deployment health
• Monitors applications for new and regressed errors with dev-centric insights to quickly fix them

PM2

PM2 is one of the most popular Node.js monitoring tools to ensure that your application is running. It is an easy to understand tool used for running and monitoring live production workloads from a web interface or CLI.

PM2 is a daemon process manager that enables Node.js developers to manage and keep their application online. To get started with this tool, the developers need to install NPM, and for that npm –version command is used. 

Further, to install PM2, npm install -g pm2 is fired.

Features of PM2

• Log management
• Auto-clustering for Node.js apps
• Container integration

Express Status Monitor

Express Status Monitor is an open-source tool used for monitoring ExpressJS. ExpressJs is one of the popular web frameworks used in Node.js.

To get started with Express Status Monitor, the Node.js developer has to follow the below steps-

• Run npm install express-status-monitor –save command.
• Then before adding any middleware or router, run app.use(require(‘express-status-monitor’)());
• Run the server and go to /status

Features of Express Status Monitor

• Monitor response time
• Request frequency
• Memory & CPU utilization
• Status code 

Appmetrics

Appmetrics is another excellent performance monitoring tool. It is an IBM managed open-source tool. Appmetrics focuses on providing the barebones to collect app metrics spread across various activities such as database query performance, garbage collection, and more. Besides this, Appmetrics uses node -gyp command to compile and frame local binary libraries that can help in enhancing execution performance.

To get started with Appmetrics, get node app metrics from three different places-

• The first place to get app metrics is npmjs.org. This can be set up by running npm install appmetrics command in the compiler.
• The second place to get node application metrics is Github.
• Then the developer needs to get node application metrics from IBM SDK for Node.js.

Features of Appmetrics

• Appmetrics-dash plugin for app monitoring
• A free and open-source tool
• Data transaction
• Network speed

Prometheus

The last Node.js monitoring tool on the list is Prometheus. It is a community-powered performance monitoring and testing tool. It is one of the most prominent open-source tools. Node.js developers can find all the components of this tool under the Apache 2 License on Github.

To work with Prometheus, you need to install and set it up correctly to get all the data. To start with Prometheus, developers need to follow the below steps-

• Download the latest release of the tool and install it by running tar xvfz prometheus-*.tar.gz command.
• Start running the executable files after creating a prometheus.yml file.
• Run Prometheus by entering $ ./prometheus –config.file=prometheus.yml command.

Features of Prometheus

• Great visualization
• Many integrations
• Precise alerting
• Many client libraries
• Efficient storage

Conclusion

Application performance testing and monitoring is a crucial step to check application performance metrics and see if your app is running properly. These tools each other have their own unique features for you to work with according to your project type.

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