Visibility and monitoring

Monitoring your applications is essential to stay on top of different aspects of your business's success, including but not limited to:

  • Performance (for example, slow database queries)

  • Security (for example, noticing a brute force attack)

  • Incident response (for example, figuring out what caused a specific issue)

  • Optimization (for example, identifying bottlenecks in a distributed system)

While you can monitor top-level infrastructure directly in your Release dashboard (such as what status a specific pod is in), you can integrate with a number of third-party monitoring providers for deeper analytics across all of your system's custom metrics and logs.

Supported third-party integrations

Naturally, Release doesn't limit how your system integrates with the third-party provider of your choice, but we have existing flows to help you integrate with the following providers. Speak to your TAM for assistance, and let us know if there are specific providers you would like to see better support for.

Datadog provides monitoring and analytics, often at an infrastructure level. It can help you get set up with:

  • Real-time distributed tracing for all your applications.

  • Security and compliance monitoring.

  • General monitoring of servers, databases, networks, and other tools.

  • Analyzing and filtering logs.

  • Playing back sessions to troubleshoot end-user issues.

Release uses Datadog internally and happily recommends it for gaining full insight into your applications.

New Relic and Datadog offer overlapping functionality, but New Relic focuses more on application-level monitoring instead of infrastructure. New Relic is an observability platform that helps you with:

  • Visualizing application metrics.

  • Troubleshooting software.

  • Tracking performance and response time metrics.

For example, you might use New Relic to analyze the web browser response times of your users, grouped by their geography and browser type.

ELK describes the common stack of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana used together. Logstash aggregates server-side logs from multiple sources and passes these to Elasticsearch in a common format. Kibana lets you build charts to visualize this data.

This overlaps with the functionality provided by Datadog and New Relic. If you're looking for an opinionated, pre-built monitoring solution, we would recommend either Datadog or New Relic. If you want to add search and custom visualisations to your existing application logs, then ELK may be easier and faster to set up. ELK doesn't require either financial or time buy-in to a specific monitoring solution like Datadog or New Relic.

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