Last month, TestGuild’s Joe Colantonio sat down with two of SmartBear’s product wizards to discuss the world of developer observability and upcoming trends. Eran Grabiner is co-founder of distributed tracing tool Aspecto, which was acquired by SmartBear earlier this year. Right now, he works as Director of Product Management for Aspecto spearheading observability projects. Justin Collier is a longtime member of the SmartBear team and currently serves as Senior Director of Product Management.

Real user monitoring (RUM) is a type of application performance monitoring that provides insights on how people interact with your app. With RUM, you can see what your users see by monitoring key elements of their experience within your application. There’s lots of industry buzz about observability, but for good reason. RUM is a critical part of digital experience monitoring because it’s incredibly valuable to understand user behavior and preferences.

When developing an Elixir app, you'll often need to handle tasks in a way that does not interrupt the normal user request-response cycle. Tasks like sending emails are great examples of jobs that should be delegated to a capable background job processing service. In the Elixir ecosystem, Oban is one such background job processing library. In this article, we'll learn what Oban is, how it works, and how to instrument it using AppSignal.

Effective monitoring is crucial for maintaining robust application performance, proactive issue detection, and efficient resource management. This guide covers ten essential monitoring best practices that developers and DevOps teams can use to improve observability and keep applications running smoothly. By following these practices, teams can ensure systems are resilient, secure, and provide a seamless user experience.

In today’s fast-paced world, operational efficiency is paramount for businesses striving to stay competitive. The ability to manage time and resources effectively directly impacts overall performance. Our recent tech paper on – ‘Maximizing Efficiency by Real-Time Detection of Beacon Check-In Delays’, highlights how real-time detection technologies can revolutionize industries by identifying and mitigating inefficiencies caused by delays in beacon check-ins.

As developers, one of the most important things we can consider when designing and building applications is the ability to know if our application is running in an ideal operating condition, or said another way: the ability to know whether or not your application is healthy. This is particularly important when deploying your application to Kubernetes. Kubernetes has the concept of container probes that, when used, can help ensure the health and availability of your application.

As software systems grow more complex, ensuring reliable performance and delivering a seamless user experience becomes increasingly challenging. Product teams need the ability to track and analyze system behavior in real-time, allowing them to address issues before they affect users. Product observability offers a proactive approach, enabling teams to gather data, monitor system health, and make informed decisions based on a complete view of both infrastructure and user interactions.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) power countless applications and services in today’s world. However, the complexity and scale of modern API ecosystems often create a blind spot for developers and operations teams. API monitoring can solve a lot of these challenges. In this article, we discuss some core concepts and the benefits of API monitoring, along with key API metrics you should track.