Introduction

In the previous chapter, you learned a few techniques about how to efficiently package and get the application ready for deployment, as well as a number of techniques to provide an environmental configuration without changing the code. With the deployment and configuration woes behind us, the last but not least, important step remains: ensuring that we have complete visibility, monitoring, and management control of our application, as it is running in the production environment and is exposed to the harsh environment of customers' (ab)use.

Just as airline pilots don't like to fly blind, neither do developers get excited if they can't see how their beloved and hard-worked-on application performs in production. We want to know, at any given time, how the CPU utilization is doing, how much memory we are consuming, is our connection to the database up and available, how many customers use the system in any given time interval, and so on and so forth. Not only do we want to know all...