In this article I will show how to utilize some aspects of the paid Bleumix Monitoring and Analysis service to look inside the performance of your applications.

State of shock

I am in a state of shock, as I am writing this post I actually broke my application, and used these very tools to figure out why……………..COOL !!!

Introduction

The paid version of Bluemix monitoring and analysis costs $0.03 per application her hour – which equates to about $21 a month per app. Once you turn this on it starts charging – and this is completely outside of the 375GB/Hour free cost. In a week I racked up $5 in charges cos I went away for an extended weekend.

 

I hooked that up to my application and immediately started to see more information about it than the free package

Clicking on the Diagnose button gives me access to more information about my slowest requests

Click on one of the request name options then shows me more information about the response time of that item

 

So how did I break the application?

I am putting together a websockets demo for MWLUG and as part of looking at this monitoring service I started to refresh my website repeatedly, quickly in multiple browsers. This blew up the application and it crashed

Out of memory……weird – how come?

Well as I look at the monitoring tools I can clearly see that the baseline application with no one using it – was hovering over 100M

So clearly we need to add more memory

Go CLOUD

All this preaching about scaling and paying for what you need is all well and good until you actually see it happen. In less than 30 seconds I have more memory applied

and after a quick restart – we can see that we are now not pushing the limit of allocated memory

This is fantastic – because I plan to do a live demo of this application in a room full of people next month – there is a really good chance that this would have crashed when 30 people connected to it – and now there isn’t – and that is freaking awesome !!!!