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Go Application Performance Monitoring | The Ultimate Guide

Gursimran Singh | 19 September 2024

Go Application Performance Monitoring | The Ultimate Guide
9:08
Mastering Golang Application Performance Monitoring

Introduction to Golang Application Monitoring

Golang Application Monitoring is a component that provides you with end-to-end visibility into the performance of your applications. It allows us the following functionalities:

  • Troubleshoot problems like slow response times and application errors.

  • Measure end-to-end transaction performance with the health of individual applications and infrastructure nodes.

  • Analyze applications at the code execution level with snapshots.

  • Automatically discover application topology and how components in the application environment fulfill transactions for its users.

  • Receive alerts based on custom or built-in health rules, including rules against dynamic performance baselines that alert you to issues.

A software development approach where developers write test cases for enhancements or new features before we write any code. Click to explore about, Golang Unit Testing

Go Performance Metrics in Real Time

  • Real-time Go metrics out of the box, without any code changes.

  • Dynatrace captures technical details of Golang apps and shows the transactions across several tiers.

  • You receive relevant process metrics steadily and can observe your own 3rd party Golang apps with Golang application monitoring.

  • Improves the performance of Golang code and optimizes the results by continuous insights into your applications.

  • Monitoring of your Golang apps will start immediately with the auto-injection of the Dynatrace Golang agent.

Optimizing Go Performance Monitoring

  • Get the results of continuous user experience insights and single-user interaction tracking.

  • Dynatrace helps to control Golang services by providing system data like CPU, responsiveness, or memory.

  • Troubleshoot anomalies within the Golang application and discover Goroutine leaks to keep down simultaneity issues.

  • Dynatrace allows using the full potential of Golang by breaking findings down into clear, customizable dashboards.

Go App Monitor Golang application performance data monitoring (goappmonitor), a library that provides a monitor on your Golang applications. It contains system-level-based monitoring and business-level monitoring, i.e., custom monitoring. We just have to add a repository into apps and register what we want to monitor. In the Golang application code, the user calls the statistics to function provided by goappmonitor; when the statistics function is called, the app monitor generates a statistical record and is stored in memory. GoAppMonitor automatically and regularly records these statistics pushed to the agent like the Open-Falcon agent.

A distinctive method of developing software systems that focuses on building a single-function module with well-defined operations and interfaces. Click to explore about, Microservices for Java and Golang

Benefits of Golang Application Monitoring

The benefits of Golang Application Monitoring are numerous and varied, providing comprehensive insights into the performance and health of your applications. These benefits include:

  • Used Memory: Track the amount of memory currently being utilized by your application, helping to identify potential memory leaks or inefficiencies.
  • Committed Memory: Monitor the total amount of memory that has been allocated for use by the application, ensuring that resources are being managed effectively.

  • Garbage Collection Metrics: Gain insights into the garbage collection process, including the frequency and duration of garbage collection cycles, which can help in optimizing memory management.

  • Suspension: Observe any suspension events that occur within the application, which can impact performance and user experience.

  • Heap Details: Analyze detailed information about the heap memory, including size and usage patterns, to optimize memory allocation and performance. 

  • Goroutine Run Queue Size: Monitor the size of the Goroutine run queue to ensure that concurrency is being managed efficiently and to identify potential bottlenecks.

  • Response Time: Measure the response times of various transactions and operations within the application, helping to identify slowdowns and improve performance.

  • Runtime System Calls: Track system calls made by the application during runtime, providing insights into how the application interacts with the underlying system.

  • Worker Thread Metrics: Monitor the performance and utilization of worker threads to ensure that they are operating efficiently and effectively.

  • Advanced Logs: Access detailed and advanced logging information, which can be crucial for debugging and understanding application behavior.

  • CPU and Memory Usage: Monitor the application's overall CPU and memory usage, which can help identify resource-intensive processes and optimize performance.

  • General System Performance: This will give you a holistic view of the system's performance, including various metrics that impact the application's operation.

  • Network Traffic: Monitor the application's network traffic to identify potential issues with data transfer and communication.

  • User Experience Insights: Obtain valuable insights into the user experience, including how users interact with the application and any issues they may encounter, allowing for targeted improvements and optimizations.

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How Golang Application Monitoring Works

While managing proprietary applications, there is no suite of utilities available, so we will have to implement our own solutions. Custom solutions, however, still require monitoring; in this, TechOps at the logical monitor has implemented custom monitoring for some of our internal tools. Back when we had a working system in place to back up all of the data, we needed to monitor that system, which has several components that need to be monitored, including a metadata database, external storage, and a centralized backup scheduler, along with performance metrics such as network throughput, CPU utilization, memory utilization, and disk performance.

 

Go makes it simple to create an HTTP server inside any application. This functionality, combined with LogicMonitor's web page data collection method, allowed us to expose custom metrics from code and start using that data to monitor our infrastructure.

A tool that enables end users, administrators and organizations to gauge and evaluate the performance of a given system. Click to explore about, Performance Monitoring Tools and Management

Best tools for Golang Application Monitoring?

The best tool for Golang Application Monitoring is described below:

New Relic

New Relic for Go monitors Golang applications and microservices to help identify and solve performance issues. We can also use our data to improve customers' experience and make data-driven business decisions. Golang has become a popular coding choice for its ease of use, concurrency, and impressive speed. With New Relic for Go, we will have a new level of visibility in Golang applications:

  • Monitor throughput, response times and errors of transactions.

  • New Relic Infrastructure to view detailed host and server data.

  • Distributed tracing to understand how services and microservices interact.

  • Deployment markers to see how code changes impact application performance.

  • Understand the application's runtime health by seeing memory usage.

  • Find bottlenecks by seeing time spent on database calls.

  • View Goroutine counts and identify possible Goroutine leaks.

  • Alerts for problems or errors before they affect users.

  • Create custom dashboards for important metrics.

  • Use New Relic Insights to query user-related data.

  • Create custom queries for Golang application data.

  • Send your own custom data to Insights.

  • Create and share visual, interactive displays of your data.

Golang Big Data Processing is the right choice if you want to build reliable and efficient software. Click to explore about, Golang for Big data and Parallel Processing Applications

Best Practices for Golang Application Monitoring

Developers need more basic server monitoring to quickly find and fix application performance problems. Existing application performance management solutions are very extortionate and lack key features that developers need in an APM product. Retrace provides developers with cost-effective and easy-to-use application monitoring software, which helps to improve application monitoring.

  • APM
  • Transaction Tracing
  • Metrics
  • Logs
  • Errors
  • Alerts

APM

Retrace collects very detailed data through its code profiling and transaction tracing capabilities. All of the data is aggregated to provide powerful reporting and alerting capabilities. With retrace, we can quickly identify why our application is slow or not working properly.

Transaction Tracing

At the heart of retrace is its ability to collect detailed performance data and transaction traces for applications. It is called retrace because it helps you retrace what your code is doing to easily find bugs and performance problems. Retrace provides the most detailed traces one can find in any APM solution.

Custom Metrics

It's very important to keep an eye on basic server metrics like CPU, memory, network, and disk performance. Developers can easily monitor their applications and track things like garbage collection, request queuing, transaction volumes, and page load times.

Log Aggregation

Retrace enables centralization of all application and server logs in one place. Full-text searching and support for structured logging make it easy to find anything in the logs. One can even set up log searches to run every few minutes and alert the team.

Application Errors Tracking

One doesn't need to log errors to log files that no one looks at. Retrace, collect all the exceptions, and send an email when new errors are found. Exceptions are exceptionally identified, and alerts can be set up based on error rates per application.

Fully Integrated Alerts

Retrace also monitors many different aspects of applications and sends alerts when something is not working properly. Alerts are grouped by application to show all open alerts for the application in one view instead of many emails. Retrace offers a wide range of performance monitoring capabilities.

A method of observing, reviewing, and managing the workflow in a cloud-based infrastructure. Click to explore about, Cloud Management and Monitoring Tools

Compressive Approach to Golang

Golang Application Monitoring is essential for ensuring the optimal performance and reliability of your applications. By providing end-to-end visibility, it enables you to troubleshoot issues, measure transaction performance, and analyze code execution in real-time. Tools like Dynatrace and New Relic offer robust solutions for capturing detailed performance metrics, while practices such as transaction tracing and custom metrics enhance your monitoring capabilities.