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16 Best Node.js Application Monitoring Tools For Improving App Health

Node.js application monitoring is crucial for ensuring your applications run smoothly and efficiently. Whether you're troubleshooting issues, optimizing performance, or simply keeping an eye on performance, monitoring Node.js applications is essential. With so many tools available, how do you choose the right one for your needs? This blog highlights different Node.js logging tools to help you compare and learn about monitoring your applications. 

Alerty's NodeJS logging solution is an excellent tool to help you achieve this goal.

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Table of Contents

What Is Node.js Application Monitoring?

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Monitoring a Node.js application is a bit like keeping an eye on a high-performance machine to ensure it's running smoothly and efficiently. It's about tracking your application's performance over time and spotting issues before they become problems. This is often called Application Performance Monitoring (APM) in the tech industry.

Node.js Monitoring Benefits

According to the 2021 Stack Overflow survey, Node.js is the sixth most popular technology developers use. With Node.js monitoring, APM tools monitor the software application’s performance and availability by:

  • Finding bottlenecks 
  • Fixing errors

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

Application Performance Insights

APM tools are designed to give you a clear view of your application's health. They help you detect anomalies, reduce latency, fix errors, and optimize the user experience.

Monitoring your Node.js application involves several layers of observation, from broad to specific, to ensure everything works as it should.

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16 Best Node.js Application Monitoring Tools For Improving App Health

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1. Alerty

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service offering application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management. It supports technologies like:

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues

Alerty monitors databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption

Alerty: Your Node.js Solution

Alerty features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize the user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:

  • Stripe API
  • OpenAI
  • Vercel

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring. 

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's NodeJS logging tool today!

2. Clinic.js

Clinic.js is a suite of diagnostic tools tailored for Node.js applications, each designed to tackle different aspects of performance. 

The Doctor tool within Clinic.js helps diagnose performance issues by providing actionable insights. It identifies potential problems such as:

  • Low CPU usage
  • Garbage collection issues
  • Delays in event handling

Clinic.js: In-Depth Analysis

Clinic.js offers guidance on remediation through its Flamegraph tool for visualizing performance bottlenecks. The Heatmap tool is also available to analyze CPU usage patterns. 

This suite approach ensures that you identify problems and receive targeted advice for resolving them, making Clinic.js a comprehensive toolkit for performance optimization.

3. New Relic

New Relic is renowned for its robust APM capabilities and ease of setup. It offers a quickstart guide for Node.js that includes pre-configured observability solutions. This makes it straightforward to implement monitoring for key metrics such as:

  • Apdex scores
  • CPU utilization
  • Transaction speeds

New Relic: Comprehensive Monitoring

New Relic’s dashboards display detailed visualizations of slow transactions and throughput to help pinpoint performance issues. Its Service Maps and Error Analytics features enhance utility by providing a holistic view of the following:

  • Service interactions 
  • Error occurrences

New Relic's code-level analysis allows for deep dives into specific issues, making it a powerful tool for comprehensive application monitoring.

4. Stackify Retrace

Retrace by Stackify combines basic and advanced application performance monitoring features into one tool. It excels in:

  • Collecting and monitoring logs
  • Tracking deployments
  • Providing detailed performance data

Retrace: Automated Insights

Retrace employs lightweight profiling to automatically track key methods in your code, helpful in identifying performance issues such as:

  • Slow queries
  • Dependencies
  • Recurring errors

Its automatic instrumentation for popular services like Express, AWS, MongoDB, and Postgres ensures smooth integration with your infrastructure. Retrace offers high-level and detailed performance insights, making it a versatile tool for maintaining application health.

5. Datadog

Datadog’s APM solution provides end-to-end visibility into Node.js applications through distributed tracing integration. This feature enables tracking performance across various platforms, from browsers to databases and down to the code level. 

Datadog: Deep Performance Tracking

Datadog’s use of hot shots for instrumentation ensures accurate data collection. The tool correlates frontend and backend data for a comprehensive understanding of:

  • Service dependencies 
  • Health metrics

With powerful service performance monitoring and troubleshooting features, Datadog is well-suited for complex, distributed applications requiring detailed performance tracking.

6. Sematext

Sematext offers a broad range of monitoring capabilities suitable for modern Node.js applications. It provides insights into processes, threads, memory usage, and garbage collection, crucial for maintaining application performance. Sematext’s support for frameworks like Express.js adds flexibility, making it easier to integrate with existing setups. 

Beyond performance monitoring, Sematext includes solutions for log management, alerting, and correlation, offering a comprehensive approach to observability. These features make Sematext a versatile tool for performance tracking and operational monitoring.

7. Dynatrace

Dynatrace stands out for its all-in-one platform integrating monitoring, security, analytics, and automation. Its APM solution offers automatic and intelligent observability, especially for cloud-native and enterprise applications. 

Hybrid Cloud Monitoring

Dynatrace provides end-to-end hybrid cloud tracing, which is invaluable for monitoring complex environments spanning multiple cloud services and on-premises infrastructure. It tracks a wide range of Node.js metrics, including:

  • Heap and process metrics
  • CPU sampling
  • Event loops
  • HTTP calls 
  • Database performance

These metrics support both performance optimization and innovation in cloud-native environments.

8. Prometheus (and Grafana)

Prometheus is a widely used open-source monitoring and alerting tool known for its scalability and robust features. Developed by SoundCloud and a CNCF project, it collects and stores time-series data, which is essential for performance monitoring. 

It integrates seamlessly with Grafana, an open-source platform for data visualization, to create powerful and customizable dashboards. This combination allows for detailed visualization of metrics and efficient alerting. 

Open-Source Powerhouse

Prometheus’s strengths include:

  • Its precise alerting capabilities
  • Extensive integrations
  • Efficient storage solutions

These strengths are making it a popular choice for developers seeking an open-source monitoring solution.

9. Sentry.io

Sentry.io specializes in error and performance monitoring and offers robust support for Node.js applications. It provides detailed error tracking and performance analysis, helping you identify and resolve issues quickly. Sentry supports frameworks such as Express and Koa, and its end-to-end distributed tracing feature allows for thorough analysis of application performance. 

The tool’s efficient root-cause analysis capabilities help pinpoint the underlying causes of issues, making it easier to address and fix problems effectively. With its focus on error monitoring and performance, Sentry.io is a valuable tool for maintaining application health.

10. AppOptics

AppOptics delivers comprehensive performance monitoring for both on-premises and cloud-based applications. It offers a unified view of metrics from applications and infrastructure, consolidating data into intuitive dashboards. This capability is handy for monitoring servers, containers, and serverless environments from a single platform. 

AppOptics provides detailed insights into application performance, helping you track and optimize metrics across various infrastructure components. Its comprehensive approach makes it a strong option for organizations managing diverse and distributed environments.

11. Bugsnag

Bugsnag focuses on error reporting and impact evaluation for Node.js applications. It automatically captures both handled and unhandled errors, providing a clear view of error occurrences and their impacts. Bugsnag’s integration with tools like email, Slack, and PagerDuty ensures you can set up alerts and stay informed about critical issues. 

The tool’s dashboards offer visualization of errors, helping you understand and address problems effectively. Bugsnag’s focus on error reporting makes it a valuable tool for managing and resolving application errors.

12. Middleware

Middleware uses an eBPF-based approach to application performance management, offering sophisticated observability features. It provides end-to-end visibility into Node.js applications and their dependencies, helping you set alerts for critical metrics and events. 

Unified Data View

Middleware’s real-time data collection includes:

  • Metrics
  • Logs
  • KPIs
  • Traces, all displayed in a unified dashboard

This comprehensive view helps troubleshoot and issue resolution, making Middleware a powerful tool for maintaining application performance and reliability.

13. PM2

PM2 is a process manager and log monitoring tool designed for Node.js applications. It helps manage applications by preventing failures and mitigating event loop lag through its auto-clustering capabilities. 

Performance Insights

PM2 provides insights into:

  • Application latency
  • Memory consumption
  • Other vital metrics, allowing you to monitor and optimize performance effectively. 

Its user-friendly interface and robust monitoring features make PM2 a practical choice for managing Node.js applications in production environments.

14. Appmetrics

Appmetrics, an open-source tool managed by IBM, provides fundamental performance monitoring for Node.js applications. It collects metrics related to:

  • Database query performance
  • Garbage collection
  • Other critical activities

Appmetrics uses the node-gyp command to compile local binary libraries, enhancing execution performance. Appmetrics is available from npmjs.org, GitHub, and IBM’s SDK for Node.js. It is a straightforward tool for developers seeking basic performance monitoring and optimization.

15. Better Stack

Better Stack offers a structured log management platform with a focus on real-time data collection and monitoring. Built on ClickHouse, it supports integrations with various frameworks and logging solutions such as:

  • Koa
  • Winston
  • Bunyan
  • TypeScript

Better Stack’s visually appealing, dark-mode UI and advanced collaboration features help streamline debugging and improve software quality. Integrated with Better Uptime for incident management, Better Stack enables easy alerting and monitoring of application behavior, making it a comprehensive observability solution.

16. Raygun

Raygun offers a powerful Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution for web and mobile applications. It's designed to provide real-time insights into application performance and issues. With installation packs available for platforms like AWS and Heroku, Raygun simplifies integration into popular environments. 

Error Reporting

For other setups, Raygun provides a custom agent, ensuring deployment flexibility. The tool delivers detailed error and crash reports, crucial for identifying and addressing outages and performance bottlenecks. Raygun offers metrics on customer experience, which help understand how end-users interact with your application. 

This comprehensive approach to monitoring, including crash reporting and customer experience analytics, makes Raygun a robust choice for businesses seeking full visibility into their application’s health.

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Why Node.js Application Monitoring Is Important

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Node.js application monitoring is crucial for several reasons, each contributing to the smooth operation and performance of your application. Here’s why it’s so important:

Proactive Issue Detection

Monitoring helps you identify potential issues before they become significant problems. You can detect anomalies early by continuously tracking metrics such as:

This allows you to address issues before they affect your users or cause downtime.

Performance Optimization

Node.js is known for its non-blocking, asynchronous architecture, which can lead to complex performance characteristics. Monitoring provides insights into your application's performance under different conditions, helping you pinpoint bottlenecks and optimize performance. 

You can investigate and optimize the code that causes delays if you notice high event loop latency.

Enhanced User Experience

An application’s performance directly impacts user experience. Slow response times, crashes, or errors can frustrate and drive users away. By monitoring application performance, you can ensure your application responds quickly and reliably, improving overall user satisfaction and retention.

Resource Management

Effective resource management is essential for maintaining application stability. Monitoring memory usage and garbage collection helps you manage resources efficiently and avoid issues like memory leaks, which can degrade performance over time. You can optimize resource allocation and prevent potential crashes by monitoring resource consumption.

Faster Issue Resolution

When problems arise, monitoring tools provide valuable insights into what went wrong. Detailed metrics and error reports help you trace issues to their source, making it easier to resolve them quickly. 

If users report slow performance, monitoring data can help you identify whether the problem is related to:

  • High CPU usage
  • Memory leaks

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What Metrics Should Be Monitored?

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CPU Usage Metrics

High CPU usage can signal performance bottlenecks or inefficient code. Monitoring this helps you optimize code to reduce CPU strain and achieve faster response times.

Node.js Event Loop Metrics

The event loop is essential for non-blocking processing. High latency or blockage can make your app unresponsive, so monitor these metrics for efficient request handling.

Garbage Collection Metrics

GC metrics help identify memory leaks and optimize memory usage. Analyzing behavior enables fine-tuning memory management and avoiding performance issues.

Memory Usage and Leaks

Memory leaks can lead to degraded performance or crashes. Monitoring memory consumption helps you optimize resource allocation and prevent application crashes.

Request Metrics

Analyzing request rates, response times, error rates, and throughput helps you optimize request handling and track user experience.

Throughput and Latency

Monitoring these metrics helps ensure timely responses to users and identifies performance issues that need addressing.

Error Rates

High error rates can negatively impact user satisfaction. Monitoring error rates helps you quickly identify and address issues affecting application performance.

Application Monitoring by Alerty

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers offering:

  • Application performance monitoring
  • Database monitoring
  • Incident management. It supports technologies like NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues.

Alerty monitors databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption

Incident Management & RUM

It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:

  • Stripe API
  • OpenAI,
  • Vercel

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring. 

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's NodeJS logging tool today!

Node.js Application Monitoring Challenges

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Asynchronous Execution

Node.js applications are built around an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model, which means tasks are executed asynchronously. Traditional monitoring tools often struggle with this model because they’re designed to trace synchronous, sequential processes. 

Asynchronous operations, such as callbacks and promises, can make it difficult to track execution flow and diagnose issues. Monitoring tools need to handle these asynchronous patterns effectively to provide meaningful insights.

Event Loop Insights

The event loop is central to Node.js’s performance. It handles multiple tasks by continuously checking for pending operations and executing them. Monitoring the health of the event loop is crucial for ensuring your application remains responsive.

Identifying bottlenecks or delays in the event loop can be challenging. Tools must provide detailed metrics on event loop latency and any potential blockages to help diagnose performance issues.

Memory Leaks

Memory management in Node.js is handled through automatic garbage collection, which can make diagnosing memory leaks more complex. Unlike languages with manual memory management, Node.js’s garbage collector periodically frees up unused memory, but leaks can still occur if objects are unintentionally retained. 

Identifying and resolving memory leaks requires tools to analyze heap snapshots and track memory usage over time. These tools help developers pinpoint the source of leaks and optimize memory management.

Real-Time Performance Monitoring

In high-traffic production environments, monitoring performance in real-time without introducing latency or overhead is crucial. Real-time performance monitoring needs to be non-intrusive to avoid affecting application performance. 

Balancing the need for detailed monitoring with minimal impact on the application’s responsiveness can be challenging, especially when dealing with large volumes of data and high request rates.

Scalability

As Node.js applications scale horizontally (e.g., across multiple servers or containers), monitoring each instance and aggregating data from these instances becomes more complex. Traditional monitoring solutions may need help to keep up with the increased volume of metrics and logs from many cases. 

Effective monitoring requires solutions that can:

  • Handle distributed environments
  • Aggregate data from multiple sources
  • Provide a unified view of application performance

Distributed Tracing

In microservices architectures, where an application is composed of multiple services interacting with each other, tracking and tracing requests across these services can be particularly challenging. Distributed tracing involves following a request as it travels through various services, which can be complex to set up and manage. 

Monitoring tools must provide end-to-end visibility across different services and understand their relationships and dependencies to diagnose issues and optimize performance effectively.

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Best Practices For Node.js Application Monitoring

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Use Specialized Monitoring Tools

Select tools designed explicitly for Node.js, like Alerty, to get better insights and accurate data than general-purpose solutions.

Collect Key Metrics

Track crucial metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, event loop latency, garbage collection stats, and response times to understand your application’s performance.

Implement Asynchronous Tracing

Follow the flow of promises, callbacks, and async functions to identify where delays or performance issues occur for easier optimization and debugging.

Utilize Real-Time Monitoring

Catch anomalies and bottlenecks immediately with real-time monitoring tools and set up dashboards and alerts to respond to performance issues as they happen.

Set Up Alerts

Configure alerts based on key performance indicators and predefined thresholds to proactively address potential issues before they escalate.

Monitor Dependencies

Keep an eye on external dependencies like databases and third-party APIs to understand their impact on your application’s performance.

Aggregate Logs

Centralize and aggregate logs from different instances of your Node.js application for easier analysis and troubleshooting.

Integrate Security Monitoring

Use security monitoring tools to detect and respond to threats and protect your application against common vulnerabilities.

Related Reading

Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users with Alerty's NodeJS Logging Tool

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service tailored for developers and early-stage startups. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools to enhance application performance. Whether you are using Node.js, NextJS, React, Vue, or a combination of these technologies, Alerty can help you identify and fix issues efficiently. 

By offering features like application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management, Alerty ensures you stay on top of your application's performance and user experience.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) to Optimize User Experience

One of the standout features of Alerty is its Real User Monitoring (RUM) capabilities, which allow you to track and analyze how users interact with your application in real-time. You can gain valuable insights into the performance bottlenecks impacting user experience by monitoring key metrics like:

  • Page load times
  • Server response times
  • User interactions

With this data, you can make informed decisions to optimize your application and improve user satisfaction.

Universal Service Monitoring for Comprehensive Visibility

Alerty's Universal Service Monitoring feature enables you to monitor not just your application but also its dependencies, such as:

  • Third-party APIs
  • Services

Whether you use services like Stripe API, OpenAI, or Vercel, Alerty can track their performance and availability, giving you comprehensive visibility into your application's ecosystem. By identifying issues with external services early on, you can proactively address them before they impact your users, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Incident Management Made Easy

Dealing with incidents is never a pleasant experience, but Alerty aims to make the process as painless as possible. With its quick incident management capabilities, you can be notified of issues as soon as they occur and take immediate action to resolve them. 

By providing detailed insights into incidents, including the root cause and impact on users, Alerty empowers you to respond swiftly and effectively, minimizing downtime and user frustration.

Cost-Effective and Easy to Use

Alerty is designed with ease of use in mind. It offers a simple setup process and intuitive user interface that make monitoring your application a breeze. By leveraging AI to simplify setup and configuration, Alerty minimizes the time and effort required to get up and running, allowing you to focus on building great software. 

Alerty is a cost-effective solution compared to its competitors, making it an ideal choice for developers and small teams looking for efficient and affordable monitoring tools.

Integrate with Your Favorite Tools

Alerty integrates seamlessly with various popular developer tools, including Sentry, to streamline your workflow and enhance your monitoring capabilities. By centralizing your monitoring and incident management processes in a single platform, you can reduce context switching and improve collaboration among team members. 

Whether you are using Node.js, NextJS, or any other technology stack, Alerty can help you catch issues before they affect your users, ensuring a smooth and reliable user experience.

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