Plumbr

• 10 CAPTURE THE BASELINE

  Process optimization starts by capturing the baseline against which to start improving. Understanding the current baseline allows you to set realistic expectations of the desired quality of your service.

  Plumbr makes this trivial: all you need to do is add a single JavaScript to your web page. After this Plumbr will automatically monitor every real user interaction in your web application.

• 20 DEFINE WHAT "INCIDENT" EVEN MEANS

  Exposed baseline can be compared against the incidents that occurred in the past. This comparison gives you the insights needed to define a service level agreement.

  Violating this agreement would result in an incident being triggered. This has to be coupled with the agreement between business and IT so that IT can take corrective actions whenever an incident is triggered.

• 30 TRIGGER ALERTS WHEN INCIDENTS HAPPEN

  Having the contract defined, you can move on and define alerting rules based on the information gathered by Plumbr. You can use your favourite alerting tool. For example, with Prometheus:

  - alert: UsersCannotLogIn
    Expr: plumbr_log_in{status="failed"} > 3
    for: 5m
    annotations:
        summary: "{{ $value }} users faced errors
                  when trying to log in"
  

  Notice the different approach taken - you will trigger incidents when the real user experience has degraded beyond the quality agreement you have set.

• 40 MITIGATE THE IMPACT

  Whenever an incident is triggered, the first step is to mitigate impact for real users. There are numerous tools available to gain additional information about the underlying root cause, including errors and bottlenecks detected by Plumbr itself.

• 50 VERIFY THE SOLUTION

  After applying the patch or workaround, the impact to real users should disappear. This can be verified again with the help of Plumbr - the triggering rule should now confirm that the patch helped and the impact is mitigated.

  After the dust has settled, write a post-mortem with detailed root cause analysis. What went wrong? What enabled it to go wrong? What can be done to make sure such issues can never happen again? Answering such questions will help your application gain stability in the long term.

• 60 GOTO 30

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Plumbr Agent instruments your web application, capturing telemetry on each user interaction.

Real user monitoring has lots of pitfalls and corner cases. For example, clicking a single button in a modern application may trigger dozens of API calls in the background, but from the user's perspective it is just a single interaction. And with the modern frontend frameworks, it becomes very tricky to figure out when the interaction even ends.

Plumbr takes care of all the complexity of monitoring real user experience directly in their browser.

Plumbr Server processes the raw telemetry data, refines it and extracts insights

Having a clear near real-time view of your application helps immensely with troubleshooting. Advanced features of Plumbr like automatic Error and Bottleneck detection will dramatically speed up the incident response, bringing you directly to the root cause. Using our cloud offering also relieves the burden of supporting monitoring infrastructure capable of tracking each user interaction.

Plumbr data provides a great signal-to-noise ratio for triggering alerts

Traditionally, alerts are triggered based on technical metrics, ranging from CPU usage to processing queue lengths. While such metrics may be very helpful in ensuring that the system remains operational, they are also notorious for false positives. It is very unpleasant to wake up in the middle of the night, only to find out that there is no actual user-visible impact.

Plumbr data can serve as a very strong and clear signal of degraded user experience.

Plumbr acts as a transparent interface between IT and Business

Finally, the terms used by Plumbr make sense both to the IT department and to the business owners or stakeholders. It becomes trivial to justify resource investments and to track how well the IT is doing using hard evidence on the user experience levels over time. With the help of Plumbr you will get rid of all the rumors-based decisions and blame games, replacing them with purposeful collaboration.

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