{"id":5461,"date":"2023-01-02T12:27:54","date_gmt":"2023-01-02T12:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gethelios.dev\/?p=5461"},"modified":"2023-04-24T09:43:54","modified_gmt":"2023-04-24T09:43:54","slug":"cut-engineering-costs-save-time-helios","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gethelios.dev\/blog\/cut-engineering-costs-save-time-helios\/","title":{"rendered":"Microservices Monitoring: Cutting Engineering Costs and Saving Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, many businesses are adopting a more conservative mindset when it comes to their resources. Cloud-native and modern dev organizations<\/span> are looking for ways to cut costs and increase efficiency. But, of course, without slowing down development velocity. Let\u2019s discuss a few ways that leveraging advanced methods for microservices monitoring can reduce engineering costs, and dev time, and lower to make organizationS much more resource-efficient while still increasing the speed and quality of the development.<\/p>\n

1. With Proper Microservices Monitoring Capabilities, Developers Will Spend Less Time Writing Logs\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

Engineers developing software in modern cloud environments are working across more than one service. They can deliver at higher velocity, but when things break down they find themselves plumbing logs looking for problems. Issues and bugs are unavoidable, the problem is that logs lack sufficient granularity and they can only be investigated if they were inserted by developers before pushing code to production.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is where distributed tracing comes in. Tracing provides an understanding of application behavior in a distributed infrastructure. By following user requests throughout microservices, tracing provides visibility into how services interact with each other, which can be leveraged into insights that can help with monitoring and troubleshooting microservices. That’s where OpenTelemetry comes in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

OpenTelemetry<\/span><\/a> is an efficient and powerful solution for setting up tracing. But just setting up tracing with <\/span>OpenTelemetry<\/span> isn’t enough if you don’t have good tooling to help you make sense out of the data that is being collected. <\/span>Helios<\/span><\/a> is a solution for dev-first distributed tracing, powered by OTel, for observability, troubleshooting, and testing microservices. It collects payloads and makes sense out of your tracing data, bubbling up errors and showing you where in your environment the problems are arising.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is what microservices monitoring and observability with Helios look like. As you can see, DB queries are collected automatically.<\/span><\/p>\n

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An overview of traces in the environment sorted by those where an error exists.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

2. Microservices Observability Lets Developers View an Auto-generated Service Map<\/span><\/h2>\n

When new developers join the team it can be difficult for them to grasp all the services running in an environment and how they communicate with one another. A service map helps draw this out in a way that is easy to grasp. Helios will draw a service map for you. One that is easy to understand and has incredible depth. This saves time otherwise spent pouring over outdated documentation, asking senior developers for assistance or going through trial and error in an attempt to understand how services connect.<\/span><\/p>\n

But a service map is not just for onboarding purposes. New and old developers will all struggle to understand where problems are happening in a complex environment. Helios\u2019s service map will help your teams understand what is happening, where it’s happening, and what needs to be fixed.<\/span><\/p>\n

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A generated service map with the error found listed on the right.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

3. Troubleshooting Microservices Problems Will Happen Faster and More Efficiently<\/span><\/h2>\n

Once a developer finds a problem in a service, the first thing they’ll want to do is re-run the same flow and test if they’re understanding of the problem truly is the problem. This is the workflow where someone is saying, “Ah, THAT was the problem… well if that’s the case then doing THIS should solve the problem… let’s find out.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Rather than re-compiling or re-building, and then shipping things through to a new environment before running the flow again, Helios allows you to do it right from within Helios.:<\/span><\/p>\n