So you have created and deployed a shiny new web application. It works in development just fine, and it seems to work in Production... They key to effective management of a web application is having good insight into your system when something fails or is about to.
The development of web applications rarely ends with deploying the code to a host server, and some would say that’s when the real work actually begins. An application which works fine in a development environment could present a wide range of issues when running in the wild, some of which are easier to anticipate than others. The web application developer has many tools and techniques available to minimize the chance of failure and maximize the chance of fixing an issue quickly. This results in more robust deploys, happier customers, increased productivity and of course more developer sanity.
In this talk we will explore the approaches which are available for testing and monitoring the health of your application in the wild. The initial part of the talk will present a few common scenarios of web application failure. We will then look at how to mitigate errors before deploying followed by a brief discussion on logging. Lastly we will consider some of the useful sets of tools which can monitor our app.