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An Introduction To Prometheus NodeJS Monitoring

Are you curious about optimizing your Node.js logging with Prometheus NodeJS? Consider a Node.js application operating without performance visibility. This blog examines how to utilize Prometheus NodeJS to analyze Node.js application performance metrics, thereby improving Node.js logging practices and optimizing application efficiency.

Looking for a seamless solution to amplify your Node.js performance monitoring with Prometheus? Try Alerty's NodeJS logging—your go-to tool for keeping track of your application's performance metrics and ensuring optimal operation. Let's uncover how this tool can help you boost your Node.js Logging and performance monitoring!

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Table of Contents

What Is NodeJS Monitoring?

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Node.js monitoring involves tracking the performance and health of applications built with Node.js, a popular JavaScript runtime environment. Monitoring is crucial for ensuring that your Node.js applications run efficiently and reliably. It helps identify and address real-time:

  • Performance bottlenecks
  • Errors
  • System issues

Monitoring Levels

This can be achieved by simple health checks to see if the server is available to more advanced setups where a monitoring library is integrated into your server that sends data to a dedicated monitoring service. It can even involve the client side of your application, offering more detailed insights into the user experience.

Developer Responsibility

Monitoring should be crucial to every developer's daily work because they need to know how the software behaves in production. 

Real-world Testing

You can let your testers work with your system and try to mock interactions or high loads, but these techniques will always be different from the real production workload.

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What Is Prometheus?

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Prometheus is an open-source system monitoring and observability tool invented in 2012. It provides monitoring, observability, and alerting features for both:

  • Cloud services 
  • Backend applications  

Data Collection

It also works on the principle of querying various endpoints and generating various data matrices, which are then stored and can be analyzed to monitor for application and cloud performance.

Features

It provides client libraries across several programming languages, providing easy Application integration.  It also provides an admin dashboard where:

  • Various data are queried 
  • Scraped from an application
  • Cloud operations are collected

Dashboard

Its Alert features also notify the application developer in case of an occurrence of any anomaly in the application metrics.

Alerts

It possesses an advanced PROMQL (Prometheus query language) feature. The developer can use advanced queries to generate data commands for appropriate analysis and measurable information insights. 

Query Language

This section will integrate Prometheus into a sample Node.js backend application utilizing the Express framework. Before proceeding, ensure that the necessary software is installed.

Data Storage

Prometheus collects and stores its metrics as time series data. This means metrics information is stored with the timestamp at which it was recorded, alongside optional key-value pairs called labels.

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4 Crucial Metrics To Measure

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Every service needs to monitor specific metrics to ensure they function optimally. These metrics can vary from low-level resources like memory usage to high-level business metrics like signups. A few crucial signals and metrics to monitor on all applications include:

1. Error Rate

Errors are user-facing and can have an immediate impact on your customers. Monitoring the error rate helps you efficiently identify and address issues that could impact:

  • User experience
  • Overall customer satisfaction

2. Response Time

Monitoring response time is crucial because latency directly affects customers and your business. Slow response times can lead to:

  • User frustration
  • Decreased engagement
  • Potentially lost revenue

By keeping track of response time, you can proactively:

  • Address any latency issues 
  • Optimize your application's performance

3. Throughput

Understanding your application's traffic can provide context for increased error rates and latency. By monitoring throughput, you can gauge how your application handles traffic influxes and identify potential bottlenecks that may impact user experience.

4. Saturation

Saturation metrics indicate how "full" your service is. For instance, if your CPU usage is consistently high, your system is reaching its capacity and may struggle to handle additional traffic. By monitoring saturation metrics, you can:

  • Anticipate system limitations. Scale your infrastructure accordingly

Alerty Offerings

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering:

  • Application performance monitoring
  • Database monitoring
  • Incident management 

Alerty Support

Alerty supports technologies like:

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js

These technologies help developers identify and fix issues. 

Database Monitoring

Alerty monitors databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS

These databases track key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption. 

Incident Management

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 Advantages

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!

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Instrumenting NodeJS

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When it comes to monitoring and logging in Node.js, instrumenting your system is vital to gaining insights into your application's performance and behavior. Prometheus NodeJS, like many other monitoring solutions, offers ready-to-use instrumentation features that make it easier to track and analyze your Node.js applications' performance.

Performance Impact

Instrumentation typically involves adding extra logic and code to your application, which can impact its performance. One primary goal of instrumenting your code is to minimize this performance overhead. 

Trade-offs

Sometimes, accepting a higher impact may be necessary if it significantly improves system visibility. As with most things in software development, instrumenting your code involves risks. 

Implementation Challenges

Instrumentation can be highly specialized, requiring expertise and additional development time to implement effectively. Poorly implemented instrumentation can introduce bugs or create excessive performance overhead, which may cause more harm than good.

Code Complexity

Adding instrumentation to your codebase may result in extra lines of code, increasing the overall complexity of your application. 

Balancing Act

This can bloat your codebase and make it harder to maintain in the long run. So, it's essential to balance gaining valuable insights through instrumentation and keeping your codebase clean and maintainable.

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Prometheus NodeJS Monitoring (Node Monitoring with Prometheus)

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Prometheus is an open-source solution for Node.js monitoring and alerting. It provides robust data compression and fast data querying for time series data.

Monitoring Challenges

When monitoring a Node.js application, we must solve challenges like:

  • Instrumentation
  • Metrics exposition
  • Hosting Prometheus
  • Extracting value
  • Visualizing
  • Alerting
  • Paging

Tool Requirements

We need a tool to safely:

  • Instrument our code
  • Expose metrics
  • Run Prometheus properly
  • Extract value from data
  • Visualize it
  • Set up alerts
  • Get notifications

Metrics Exporter

The Node.js Metrics Exporter uses the prom-client npm library to collect metrics from a Node.js application and expose them to Prometheus. 

Prometheus Model

Prometheus uses an HTTP pull model, meaning the application needs to expose a GET /metrics endpoint so that Prometheus can periodically fetch it.

Metric Types

Four types of metrics are used in Prometheus: 

  • Counter
  • Gauge
  • Histogram
  • Summary

Pushgateway

The counter is cumulative, the gauge can go up and down, the Histogram samples observations and counts them in configurable buckets, and the Summary calculates configurable quantiles over a sliding time window.

Querying Metrics

Prometheus uses the Pushgateway to monitor components that can't be scraped. Later, it can scrape metrics from the gateway. After collecting metrics, we write statistically correct queries to extract their value. 

Alerting

Prometheus provides a functional expression language to select and aggregate time series data in real-time. You can determine the 95th percentile of response time from histogram metrics, which helps filter out peaks. 

Kubernetes Integration

You can also determine the average response time. Prometheus has a built-in alerting feature but requires a notification system like Alert Manager or another external process to send alerts. 

Prometheus Provisioning

Prometheus offers a built-in Kubernetes integration that can discover Kubernetes resources like:

  • Nodes
  • Services
  • Pods while scraping metrics

Provisioning Tools

This integration is powerful in a containerized system where instances are born and die constantly. It easily provisions Prometheus with:

With a Kubernetes cluster, you can initialize Helm and install Prometheus in just a few steps. 

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Challenges Of Prometheus NodeJS Monitoring

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While Prometheus is a powerful monitoring tool, there are specific challenges when monitoring NodeJS applications. 

Data Limitation

One key challenge is the limitation in storing event logs or events in Prometheus. Due to this limitation, high-cardinal data such as email addresses or usernames cannot be stored in Prometheus. 

Data Sensitivity

This can be a significant drawback when dealing with applications where precise data is crucial, like financial transactions.

Scalability Issues

Another challenge with monitoring NodeJS using Prometheus is scalability issues. As systems become more distributed and complex, Prometheus encounters difficulty aggregating metrics from numerous instances. 

Monitoring Complexity

This can lead to engineering efforts and complexities, disrupting the efficiency of incident response and overall system management.

Data Retention

Prometheus is designed to store metrics data only for a short time. Historical data can be valuable for organizations looking to analyze patterns over time and make informed decisions about system utilization. 

Insight Loss

Without the ability to store metrics data for an extended period, organizations may miss out on critical insights that could:

  • Help scale solutions
  • Improve system performance.

Tool Integration

Despite the challenges, pairing Prometheus with tools like Grafana for visualization and Alerty for comprehensive application health and performance monitoring can help overcome some limitations. 

Comprehensive Monitoring

By integrating various tools, organizations can create a more robust monitoring system that provides a holistic view of their:

  • Applications and 
  • Infrastructure

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

Alerty is a one-stop cloud monitoring service tailor-made for developers and early-stage startups. It offers various functionalities, including:

Technology Support

The platform extends its support to various technologies like:

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js, making it an ideal choice for a broad spectrum of users 

Database Coverage

Are you looking for a robust monitoring solution that covers databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS

Alerty has you covered, keeping a keen eye on essential metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption. 

Incident Management and RUM: Elevating User Experience

Alerty also features quick incident management, ensuring issues are addressed promptly to minimize the potential impact on users. 

User Experience Monitoring

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is seamlessly integrated into the platform, enabling a real-time understanding of user experience and performance optimization. 

Universal Service Monitoring

Are you seeking a comprehensive solution for Universal Service Monitoring that covers dependencies such as the Stripe API, OpenAI, and Vercel? Alerty offers precisely that, ensuring that your application ecosystem is under constant vigilance.

AI-Powered Simplicity and Cost-Effectiveness

What sets Alerty apart is its innovative use of artificial intelligence to simplify the setup process and streamline users' monitoring experience.

User-Friendly Solution

This makes it incredibly user-friendly and provides a cost-effective solution compared to other competitors in the market. Are you searching for a monitoring tool designed for:

  • Ease of use
  • Quick setup
  • Seamless integration with tools like Sentry

Ideal User Base

Alerty ticks all these boxes, making it a perfect fit for developers and small teams looking for efficient and affordable monitoring solutions.

Monitoring Complexity

Monitoring and incident management can be complex and overwhelming, especially for developers and startups. 

Comprehensive

Alerty cuts through this complexity, offering a vibrant and comprehensive solution that helps you avoid issues before they impact your users. 

Proactive Monitoring

Whether it's NodeJS logging or database monitoring, Alerty has you covered with its proactive approach to user experience optimization. Dive into the world of Alerty today and take your monitoring game to the next level!

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