Fewer unit tests more logs

But, as you can imagine, fast software delivery involves cutting corners, or should I say, “corner cases”. You put yourself and your software team at risk of being attacked by hordes of unexpected errors coming from both external and internal users; think: unhandled form data, duplicate orders, records removed by mistake, a super important request from a big fish client, and the list continues. All of a sudden, the manual work you’ve taken away from the other departments ends up on your plate. Now, how to fix it?

So, let’s see what measures you can leverage to reduce error handling work in your team and, what’s more important, improve the quality of your service after all. We will describe the low hanging fruits first and in the last section, point you in the right direction when it comes to heavyweight monitoring tools.

Unified logging structure is invaluable for error handling. For a business app like Manufaktura I dare say it saves you (as a developer) more time than any collection of tests no matter if they are unit or end-to-end. But it’s also beneficial for the security and devops team later on when your business matures.

A detailed error logging example:

Now, let’s see why these rules are so important. Logging makes little sense if there isn’t an easy way to analyze it. One way forward is to dump your logs into files on your server, login via ssh and browse with your favorite bash spells. But this can be time-consuming and the analysis itself might not be intuitive. Also, you have to manage the storage problem yourself.

And it is the alerting which is the key takeaway I want you to leave with. Being able to define and be notified about critical error messages is the backbone of a sustainable monitoring system for an early stage system.

Imagine the time saved if you can select which errors are actually important to you and if you can get the error context in a well-formatted email or a dedicated Slack channel.

So, how can we get email/Slack/SMS alerts fast? The answer is: we’ll employ a SaaS platform (you might have already noticed this pattern in our series).

Let’s get back to the alerts though. Creating email notifications is super simple with LogEntries. You just define a tag using built-in filters or regex and then define which tag should send an email and who gets it. It’s worth noting that you can also adjust the frequency.

In an online marketplace business like Manufaktura, the CTO will be notified about expected and unexpected errors:

*As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, prioritizing which cases should be implemented first or which features should be shipped at all is a skill in itself. The only way to learn it is the hard way — through experience. The good news is that with the error alerts you just got a handy tool to reduce the impact of the wrong choice.

Imagine you can get a complex application performance dashboard, including metrics like:

Anyway, at the early stage you don’t need most of the New Relic features. You can go around with just the APM module. And if you host your platform on heroku, New Relic has an interesting $49 offer for you:

What’s also nice about New Relic is the alerting module. Similar to LogEntries alerts, you can subscribe for expected unexpected situations. Like spikes in the traffic which your application cannot handle yet. This gives you a way to react before the shit really hits the fan, e.g. you can scale-up your infrastructure for the increased traffic period or try to queue jobs and process them later.

The basic LogEntries and NewRelic notifications run on email. For both tools, you can also add a Slack channel through webhooks. Unfortunately these aren’t much use when you sleep. And your platform might have one or two super-critical business processes you don’t want to be down even for a minute.

These 3 SaaS monitoring tools are good value for money investments in an early stage online business. The configuration and hosting doesn’t require a dedicated administrator and they all have offers for small teams (LogEntries $39, New Relic $49, PagerDuty $9). What you get is priceless — reduced manual work for your dev team and the quality of service increases. Having such a thick safety net, our Manufaktura is ready to develop more power features. In the next article, we’ll tackle one of these — email and SMS communication.

Now, when the number of features grow, the infrastructure swells and so do the bills from our SaaS monitoring providers. That’s when you might want to reconsider your monitoring toolset and tap into self-hosted open source products. These are some of the market leaders:

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