Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

With all the buzz surrounding user experience these days, I thought it might be worthwhile to start “at 50,000 feet” and dissect user experience into its component parts and see what all the fuss is about. User experience (UX) is somewhat different than customer experience (CX). Customer experience has been defined as the quality of all a consumer’s encounters with a company’s products, services, and brand. Today, user experience typically refers to the digital user experience.

Distributed tracing remains one of the most important features of any tracing system. Nearly a year ago, we announced Elastic APM distributed tracing, let’s take a look at how this useful feature works behind the scenes. Over the past few years, many applications have adopted microservice architecture. Each of the services in a microservice architecture can have their own instrumentation to provide observability into the service.

Distributed tracing is great — it helps you identify (micro)services within complex architectures having issues interfering with user experience, such as high latency or errors. But once a problematic service is identified, it can be difficult to find out which methods are to blame for the slowdown. Well, we have some big news to share for our Elastic APM users within the Java ecosystem.

Things are about to get real in so many ways. Companies are telling employees to work from home, which sounds great in theory — less contact, less chance for the COVID-19 virus to spread. But what about the strain it’s going to place on your IT infrastructure? Your employees will be connecting over a remote virtual infrastructure (Citrix, VMware, AWS, etc) and accessing a variety of in-house web applications (Java, .NET etc.) and SaaS services (Office 365).

So your organization has decided to move to the cloud. Smart move! Many companies today are either making the move to the cloud or have already made it. According to RightScale’s 2019 State of the Cloud Survey, 94% of IT professionals say their companies use the cloud. Over 90% is public cloud. Gartner predicts that public cloud revenue will increase by 17% in 2020. The biggest percentage increase is expected with IaaS. So, you’re clearly not alone.

We’ve had a lot of great feedback about our integration with Slack. Customers find it invaluable to have all the information about an error or issue delivered to a channel of their choice. Using Raygun Crash Reporting or APM and Slack together, everyone involved is alerted to a problem, and an indication of the cause can be ascertained immediately. The appropriate person can then be assigned to complete the investigation and resolve the error or issue pronto.

With the advent of the cloud and microservices, application architectures have become complex, and monitoring their performance is critical in protecting your business' bottom line. To troubleshoot performance problems quickly and achieve a reduced mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR), the use of an application performance monitoring (APM) tool is invaluable.