Instrumenting web applications
Web applications differ from mobile and desktop applications in many ways, including the fact that large portions of the application run on a server rather than a client. This enables developers to collect information on how web applications are run more easily than other types of applications. This is known as instrumenting an application.
Logs are text messages that are saved by a system to describe the execution path that the server follows. This helps developers go back in time and explore what has happened by examining the logging output. Structured logging is quickly becoming the standard for trace logging. Structured logging is a technique where logs are no longer only text messages. Instead, logs are parameterized text messages with a set of values for each parameter. This has two advantages – logs can be better compressed, and they can be searched more quickly.
Metrics are values that are recorded for an application. They take the...