Do sluggish web pages and intermittent errors make you feel like you‘re flying blind when managing your applications? As a developer, there‘s nothing more frustrating than when users complain about poor performance or outages in production environments. You‘re left scrambling trying to piece together what went wrong.
This common pain point is why Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools have become essential for engineering teams. APM gives you real-time observability into your critical production apps to identify performance issues before they disrupt users.
In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll explore how Retrace, a leading APM solution from Stackify, can empower you to monitor and improve application experiences.
The High Cost of Performance Problems
While most developers realize the importance of performance, many underestimate the business impact of poorly optimized software:
- Developers spend over 30% of time resolving production issues
- A 100ms increase in page load time reduces conversion rates by 7%
- 81% of users will not return to an app after just 2-3 poor experiences
And when your CEO asks why the website is down on Cyber Monday, you‘ll wish you had an APM tool giving insight into critical user transactions.
Without proper monitoring in place, teams get stuck in reactionary modes, fighting the same fires over and over each time performance suffers.
The right APM solution provides the visibility you need into your full software stack to maintain reliably fast apps that customers love.
What is Retrace?
Retrace is an APM platform offered by Stackify taking an application-centric approach to observability. Instead of just monitoring infrastructure metrics, Retrace ties code-level diagnostics with environmental context.
This means Retrace enables you to:
- Track individual code paths – See every method and query involved in servicing transactions
- Set Data Context – Capture essential context like current user, device type, or source
- Log Messages – Manually instrument trace statements for debugging
- Emit Custom Events – Instrument timing, metrics, and metadata unique to your app
While most monitoring platforms treat apps as black boxes, Retrace actually illuminates what‘s happening inside your software allowing much faster diagnosis of complex issues.
Key Capabilities
Retrace provides comprehensive monitoring across your stack including:
- Application Performance Management
- Error Detection + Diagnostics
- Log Management + Analysis
- Alerting + Notifications
It supports all major languages and frameworks – perfect for polyglot environments:
- .NET
- Java
- Node.js
- PHP
- Python
- Ruby
- Go
Now let‘s walk through getting your apps set up with Retrace.
Getting Started with Retrace
Retrace uses auto-instrumenting agents to seamlessly collect traces and metrics from your apps without any code changes.
Here are the simple steps to get Retrace monitoring your apps:
- Sign Up for Retrace SaaS – Create your account at https://stackify.com to access a fully managed Retrace environment with immediate availability.
- Install Retrace Agents – Download lightweight agents for your app servers. Agents automatically instrument apps without any code changes. All popular languages supported.
- View Your App Dashboard – Agents will phone home with health metrics, errors, logs, and traces from your running apps.
Within minutes, you‘ll suddenly have code-level visibility to begin optimizing performance and diagnosing issues.
Now let‘s explore how to leverage Retrace‘s robust capabilities…
Using the Retrace Dashboard
Retrace provides a centralized dashboard giving you full-stack observability across all of your business critical applications.
At a glance you can monitor:
- Health Status – Showing available applications and any with problems
- Throughput – Requests, load, traffic
- Performance – Response times, errors
- User Experience – Apdex score based on acceptable response thresholds
Drilling into a specific application provides greater detail:
Now you have insight to:
- Triage application issues – Errors, crashes, exceptions
- Optimize slow transactions – DB calls, 3rd party services
- Understand workload – Requests, throughput
- Improve user experience – Meeting apdex targets
Rich connectivity between metrics, traces, logs, and code expedites root cause analysis.
Troubleshooting with Retrace
When issues arise, Retrace accelerates diagnoses by exposing code-level detail including:
- Lines of code invoked
- SQL queries made
- API calls to external services
- Log messages emitted
- Custom events timed
For example, some ways Retrace provides unprecedented troubleshooting efficiency:
Slow Page Load Diagnosis
- Waterfall traces expose slow SQL queries
- See query text and calling code without logging into DB
- Get environmental context – user, geo, browser etc.
Shopping Cart Outage Post-Launch
- Error rates spike when promotion email sent
- Traces reveal calls to 3rd party payment API failing
- Payment vendor overwhelmed with traffic from promo
Without Retrace‘s ability to look inside your apps, teams lose countless hours trying to pinpoint root causes by cobbling together logs, metrics, code files, and screenshots.
Retrace Integrations & Customization
While most APM solutions focus narrowly on health metrics, Retrace goes further with capabilities tailored for modern devops teams:
Collaboration Integrations
Native integrations instantly send Retrace alerts to tools your team already uses like:
- Slack
- PagerDuty
- Jira
- Webhooks
Ensure on-call staff immediately notified of errors before customer impact.
Custom Dashboards
Retrace makes it simple to build custom dashboards tracking business metrics unique to your app – no coding required.
Common examples include:
- Sales / Revenue
- New Account Registrations
- Downloads / Upgrades
Get a pulse on factors impacting the bottomline.
Anomalies Detection & Alerting
Machine learning automatically establishes dynamic thresholds across 250+ data types and alerts when unusual patterns emerge – no more static limits.
Know immediately if daily traffic, sales, signups, or errors deviate from the norm.
Release Tracking
The problems that make it to production are often subtle and crop up only under specific conditions.
Retrace ties errors, crashes, and performance issues back to the exact version deployed using release markers – critical for CI/CD environments.
Code Profiling
For more advanced debugging, Retrace includes optional Prefix Tracing and Prefix Profiling capabilities providing method timing and code execution detail.
How Retrace Compares
Retrace competes head-to-head with enterprise APM heavyweights including New Relic and Datadog. Here‘s an overview of how they stack up:
| Retrace | New Relic | Datadog | |
| Code Visibility | Full | Limited | Minimal |
| Support | 24/7 Dev-centric | Limited | Limited |
| Pricing | Lowest | High | High |
See Retrace pricing plans here.
Start Monitoring Your Apps with Retrace
As you can see, Retrace makes it possible to monitor application performance, errors, and logs with unprecedented code-level visibility – even in complex microservices environments.
The key Retrace capabilities include:
- Rapid onboarding – Be running in under 15 minutes
- Code-centric observability – Unlike any other APM
- Full-stack monitoring – Backend apps & databases
- Continuous delivery – Constant enhancements
- Enterprise scale – Optimized for CI/CD & elastic cloud infrastructure
Performance problems will inevitably happen – but with Retrace giving you code-level insight, your team will confidently navigate any application issue. The result will be world-class digital experiences delivering the scale, speed, and reliability users expect in the modern age.
Visit stackify.com/retrace to take advantage of a free trial and see the benefits firsthand today.
