Guide
What is application monitoring?
Application monitoring is the practice of collecting signals from running software to answer whether it is working: whether it is failing, how fast it responds, whether it is available, and whether anyone is successfully using it.
The four signals
Most monitoring reduces to four questions. Is it failing — error monitoring. Is it slow — performance monitoring. Is it up — availability monitoring. Is it being used — product analytics. Teams typically adopt them in that order and end up with a different vendor for each.
- Failure: exceptions, crashes, error rate
- Speed: latency percentiles, throughput, traces
- Availability: uptime checks and health endpoints
- Usage: active users, sessions, feature adoption
Why the signals are worth more together
Each signal in isolation answers a narrow question. Combined, they answer the one that actually drives work: what should we fix first. An error rate without usage data cannot distinguish an outage from a curiosity.
Monitoring and observability
Monitoring watches known signals and alerts on known thresholds. Observability describes whether a system emits enough data to answer questions nobody thought to ask in advance. The distinction matters less in practice than vendors suggest; both require instrumenting the application.
Where ErrorDock fits
ErrorDock covers failure, speed, availability and usage in one platform, and brings them together in a per-feature health view and one ranked list of priorities.
Related
- What is error monitoring? Error monitoring is the practice of automatically capturing, grouping and prioritising exceptions from running software. A practical guide to how it works.
- What is application performance monitoring? APM measures how long operations take and where the time goes. What percentiles mean, why averages mislead, and what a trace actually shows.
- What is product analytics? Product analytics measures what users do inside software: active users, retention, and which features get used. A guide written for engineers.
- Fix what matters to your users. Bring errors, performance and feature usage together to help prioritise engineering work by its effect on the product.
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