Hi, I’m Valerio a Laravel-certified developer from Italy.

I deliver new code changes almost every day, but waiting for users to report errors or bottlenecks, I’m effectively outsourcing bug discovery to users. Users don’t reports bugs, they eventually just stop using our apps.

That’s why applications that are critical for the health of our business simply can’t be monitored manually. Manual monitoring process used by most developers today is costly, time-consuming, and leaves a huge margin for error.

What are the risks of manual application monitoring ?

When it comes to expectations, customers are primarily looking for two key attributes in your apps: availability and performance. Missing the mark on either of these can negatively impact your economical interests in several ways.

Productivity slow down

Figuring out that something is not working is easy, but understanding why it’s not working… uhmmm…

Without monitoring in real time your application when a customer reports to you that something doesn’t work forces you to drop whatever you are doing and start trying to reproduce the scenario, then recapture and reanalyze the logs in your own toolset.

Getting a true picture of what’s happening could require hours or, based on my experience, even days.

In the meantime your productivity slows down and your customer is waiting news.

Decreased long-term customer expectations

A poor digital experience can affect your customers’ perception that your service is right for them in the long term.

Users who have experienced an application that freezes, crashes, is too slow or involves too-complicated functionalities would not consider using that application in the future, and most of these users will share their negative experiences with other peers if asked, harming your reputation.

Many of my customers are actually other technology companies. I work a lot to be perceived as a trusted partner. But if the work becomes slow and I continually create delays rather than solutions, they could easily turn to others.

What benefits does an autonomous monitoring tool give you?

Automated monitoring of your application can make a huge difference in your workflow and, ultimately, improve your business.

Here are three immediate benefits you could have from day one by getting your application under control.

Stay one step ahead

Real-Time alerts means that you can be aware that something goes wrong hours before your user will call.

A true developer tool should visually represents your code execution flow. This gives you the ability to identify bugs at a glance before your users are even aware of them.

This one feature can drastically reduce customer churn.

Higher developer productivity

Solving production problems can be very hard and time-consuming.

Delegating performance measurement and monitoring to an autonomous tool helps developers to spend more time making code improvements instead of on application debugging.

Furthermore, if something goes wrong they will be alerted immediately so they can sleep better at night.

Time is money, and finding skilled people is not easy at all. It is important to keep them working on innovating new products that can grow your business.

Tools that make your developers more productive are highly valuable.

Better collaboration

Unified insights help a team to troubleshoot application errors and exceptions, making the subsequent decisions clear and based on real measurements.

In non-unified environment, each developer would need to reproduce errors, recapture the logs and reanalyze them in their own toolset.

Decrease reliance on costly tools

Application monitoring is very helpful to identify opportunities for improvement. A SQL query tweak here, some code refactoring there and you might able to lower your hosting costs through some optimizations.

An automated monitoring tool can help you understand how your application uses external services, databases and much more. A little performance tuning around these dependencies can allow you to scale down your application resources.

Conclusion

In today’s competitive marketplace, manual monitoring for essential business applications no longer cuts it.

By implementing an automated monitoring solution, your business’s applications will have a continuous eye on them and you’ll be alerted the moment anything goes wrong, before your users even know there’s an issue.

You’ll save time and money, free developers to use their time more productively, and have the opportunity to cut costs by scaling down on resources.