As engineering leaders, we all struggle to find the balance between creating cool technology and useable technology. Let’s be real. We all want to create cool things. It’s in our nature. But what’s the point of doing so when no one will use it? It’s crucial to remember that the ultimate goal of our work is to create something helpful and effective. Our work has to have a purpose.
Developers will remember times when they were trying to figure out why something they were working on wasn’t behaving as expected. Hours of frustration, too much (or perhaps never enough) caffeine consumed, and sotto voce curses uttered. And then — as if by fate — the issue is narrowed down to a simple oversight that makes perfect sense upon discovery. Problem solved!
Lately, everyone has been jumping on the cloud transformation bandwagon, which isn’t surprising, because when it comes to tech, you don’t want to find yourself behind, stuck with your dusty old monoliths. Just kidding – we love ourselves some good old monolith architectures – but there’s no comparing to dynamic, cloud-native technology.
When it comes to understanding what’s happening in your code – and your service health, specifically – business and code-level metrics are key. While most developers are experts in their own code, that doesn’t mean that they’re also experts on the metrics, statistics, or distributed tracing from the code they’re working with. The code-level metrics they need are tough to set up and it’s something that no one else can do for them.
As we move past the stage where automation is no longer the concern, intelligence is at the front seat, being the driving force of technology in almost every space. With lines of codes that are being thought upon, strategized upon, and then implemented, viruses, and bugs, are no Bueno. Since the world is moving more towards online communities than physical ones, these bugs and viruses create havoc and disorient business functioning.
Installing Rookout on your Node.JS application is usually a breeze. Run `npm install`, add a line of code, and you are done. Yet, in some rare cases, we encounter more frustrating use cases. For example: When those tough situations arise, our customers often refer to this blog post we wrote years ago about deploying a Java Agent. So, if you are looking for an easy and portable way to deploy Node agents without changing your code, you’ll want to read this article.
In part one of this series, the debugging tools we used — Elixir's IO.inspect/2, IEx.pry, and dbg/2 — required us to insert changes into code directly. Outside the development environment, you probably won't (and shouldn't) have access to your code. Erlang has a few tools to debug code at runtime: :debugger, :dbg.tracer, and :observer. First, let's look at the:debugger, a graphical debugging tool. Let's get going!
