When Disaster Strikes: Using Application Monitoring During A Software Crisis

 

If you have a pressing problem with your application that needs immediate attention, an app monitoring tool can play a swift and direct role in your online error management efforts.

If you are looking for ways to turn the tables on error and log management, especially during the first hours of a crisis, then you’ll want to learn how to use automated application monitoring as a devastating weapon in your arsenal for application development and maintenance.

Stick with us to learn the truth.

The Story of an App Crisis in Full Swing

If one of your live applications is experiencing a crisis, you’ll have to take swift and immediate action to troubleshoot the problem steps to alleviate the complete fallout of this negative situation.

As an example, let’s say a big online platform such as Plumfund is down and the failure of the app needs to be quickly identified. Crowdfunding campaigns are losing backers because of the fallout, and the users are getting angry!

In this example, one of the dev ops team members at said firm now needs to figure out where the problem is and find a quick but safe way to solve it. Sometimes, they will reach out to the programmer who was initially working on the tool, but usually they would need to own the problem on the production server and solve it.

For the most part, the team members would typically use manual research to find the failure source. But by the time they reached the tip of the crisis, the users have already started sending in angry support tickets.

This may come as a major shock because they never expected to receive that many support tickets. And they hadn’t even been fully alerted to their crisis at this point.

The example company didn’t use no automated application monitoring at all, so they had no idea that the crisis was generating so many issues.

But now that they were alerted to the crisis, they had to allocate time to think of the ideal approach to handle this situation and come up with strategies for this issue. The time that is essentially the most lacking element of any crisis.

3 Considerations to Manage an App Crisis While Using Error Monitoring

Begin Targeting The Source Of The Crisis

One area to take instantaneous action is to begin searching for the source of the app failure.

To stick with our example, you can set up automated troubleshooting using specific tools such as Stackify Retrace to identify the root cause of an issue quickly.

It would make sense to have as much data as possible about a certain issue without too much legwork.

So, instead of orchestrating an entire troubleshooting army to drill down on the problem, you can have all the information pulled out easily for you. When you are pressurized to make the app work again — and fast! — information is your key to success.

Using Clues to Your Advantage

During a time of crisis, the clues about the error we gain is definitely one step forward to the solution.

The biggest question:”Why is this happening?” becomes less dreadful for the dev ops team, as they are lead to the root cause.

Armed with information, the teams save valuable time detecting the cause. Because, many issues take as much as an hour to solve, as opposed to some issues taking an entire half of a day just to figure out.

Make Your Approach Proactive Instead of Reactive

As a an app developer, you may be missing out on a ton of information about the app’s patterns, trends and behaviours when not using application monitoring. So, things become reactive – waiting for the crisis to happen in order to react to it.

The proactive approach – tracking your application’s performance regularly – can give you the instrument to measure and monitor your software in different aspects. That way, the dev team is on top of issues even before they spiral out of control.

Conclusion

If you find yourself in an app failure crisis, please use this application tracking advice to help mitigate the damage and put an end to this mess once and for all.