The ability to observe and collect information about your application in production is often called “Observability”. If you have Node.js applications in production you should be thinking about Observability of those applications from the start. Below is a great starting point for learning about Observability in the Node.js space.
Instrumenting in Containers
One great thing about Node.js is how well it performs inside a container. The shift to containerized deployments and environments comes with extra complexity. Observing your application in both the front-end and backend is important. Using something like OpenTelemetry can help.
- How to use OpenTelemetry to trace Node.js applications | Red Hat Developer
- How to enable OpenTelemetry traces in React applications | Red Hat Developer
Also knowing what to look for when problems come up in your production environment can save you time and energy
Logging
Our applications log files can tell us a lot about how our application is acting or in many ways, how it is not acting. Choosing the right tool is also just as important. The Node.js Reference Architecture can provide help with advice from our Node.js experts here at Red Hat and IBM as well as showing how to consume those logs.
- Our advice for the best Node.js logging tool | Red Hat Developer
- Consume Pino logs from Node.js applications | Red Hat Developer
AI
With more and more AI functionality being added to code, it is also important to be able to add observability to those applications.
Conclusion
As always if you want to learn more about what the Red Hat Node.js team is up to check these out:
https://developers.redhat.com/topics/nodejs
https://github.com/nodeshift/nodejs-reference-architecture
https://developers.redhat.com/e-books/developers-guide-nodejs-reference-architecture
