Using PaaS? Don’t Forget Application Monitoring

What do Snapchat, Khan Academy, and Product Hunt have in common? Besides having been startups at one point, they all run on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment.

Why did these companies and many others choose PaaS? Because PaaS—both public and private—can help enable developers to take advantage of application frameworks and services to design, code, test, and manage innovative new applications (and re-architect some older ones) without planning and procuring the underlying infrastructure.

How’s Your Application Performing?

While PaaS might be a dream come true for many developers, it can make one aspect of delivering successful software more difficult: monitoring application performance. With PaaS, you don’t necessarily have all the visibility into the performance and health of your application that you need.

For instance, we think you should know how your application is performing at any given time as well as how your application is using various services such as databases, storage, and compute. This can help you make sure that changes to the PaaS environment aren’t negatively impacting performance.

Why do we think this is so important? That’s what our new article, “Got PaaS? Better Get Visibility,” sets out to explain. It covers four of the top reasons why we believe you should monitor apps in a PaaS environment. In this post, we’ll touch on one of those reasons: the customer experience. 

Customer Experience Trumps Everything

Digital consumers expect rich, personalized experiences in nearly every aspect of their lives, which means that virtually every company today is in the software business. To be successful in this new environment, your team has to focus on the customer experience—because a poor user experience can quickly turn off customers and send them to your competition, which are often only a click away.

Optimizing the customer experience obviously requires the right data. A SaaS-based software analytics solution can bring together application and customer experience data—regardless of where your application is running—to give development, operations, marketing, sales, and other parts of the business greater insight for improved decision making. Ultimately, such a tool can help you deploy resources where they make the greatest impact on the customer experience and the business.

Monitoring PaaS with SaaS

Software analytics can help you maintain visibility, control, and accountability across your PaaS environment—and a SaaS-based solution lets you do that without additional hardware and infrastructure to install and maintain, while also helping you comply with PCI, HIPAA, and other regulations. In fact, you’d be surprised by the extent of the security capabilities and risk profile that a modern SaaS can offer.

To learn more about why and how you should be monitoring apps running on your PaaS, read the full article.