Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Businesses that have mission-critical applications deployed on servers often have operations teams dedicated to monitoring, maintaining, and ensuring the health and performance of these servers. Having a server monitoring system in place is critical, as well as monitoring the right parameters and following best practices. In this article, I’ll look at the key server monitoring best practices you should incorporate into your operations team’s processes to eliminate downtime.

Elasticsearch (ES) is a powerful tool offering multiple search, content, and analytics capabilities. You can extend its capacity and relatively quickly horizontally scale the cluster by adding more nodes. When data is indexed in some Elasticsearch index, the index is not typically placed in one node but is spread across different nodes such that each node contains a “shard” of the index data. The shard (called primary shard) is replicated across the cluster into several replicas.

Disk-related issues with Elasticsearch can present themselves through various symptoms. It is important to understand their root causes and know how to deal with them when they arise. As an Elasticsearch cluster administrator, you are likely to encounter some of the following cluster symptoms.

Any software application or a system can have bugs and issues in testing or production environments. Therefore, logging is essential to help troubleshoot issues easily and introduce fixes on time. However, logging is useful only if it provides the required information from the log messages without adversely impacting the system’s performance. Traditionally, implementing logging that satisfies these criteria in Java applications was a tedious process.

Communication with our users is very important. You want them to be aware of the new features that your platform exposes, exciting news about the company, but also about the status of the services that you are building for them. This includes information about all the functionalities and the infrastructure and applications behind them – when they work correctly and efficiently and when they don’t.

Logging is the process of keeping records of activities and data of a software program. It is an important aspect of developing, debugging, and running software solutions as it helps developers track their program, better understand the flow and discover unexpected scenarios and problems. The log records are extremely helpful in scenarios where a developer has to debug or maintain another developer’s code.

Apache is the second most popular web server, after …., with its roots and official release going back as far as 1995. Throughout the years, it gained features, including HTTP/2, caching, and many more, while retaining its most appreciated capabilities: speed, modularity, and great stability. To fully leverage its features, you need to understand the environment, bottlenecks, traffic and user behavior. Just like with every software inside your infrastructure, Apache is no different.

User experience is key to ensuring the success of your website. There are many metrics that help you gauge and improve it, but Core Web Vitals are probably the most important ones. They are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. By measuring dimensions of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads, Core Web Vitals help you understand how your website is doing in terms of performance.

Apache Tomcat is the Java web server that implements many Java features like web site APIs, Java server pages, Java Servlets, etc. It’s an open-source software widely used in the industry. Tomcat sits on top of your application and is the entry point for reaching your application code. It is crucial to monitor its performance and make sure everything works, get notified when unexpected errors occur, and take action in real-time.

This article is the third of a four-part series of articles about Elasticsearch monitoring. In the first article, we put together an Elasticsearch guide, covering how Elasticsearch works and why the setup and tuning of Elasticsearch requires a good knowledge of configuration options and performance metrics.