Developers are expensive to hire, and it takes time to get new hires up to speed. Getting the most out of developers and retaining them should be a priority for any organization. Fortunately, developers like creating new stuff, and organizations want new functionality. Therefore, if there was a way of minimizing the time spent fixing bugs, the new feature backlog would be reduced, and happy developers would stay around.
Minimize Bugs
Fixing bugs is essential, but it delays delivering new features, increasing the backlog. Searching through megabytes of logs trying to figure out why something is not working quite right is a soul-destroying task and does not make for happy developers; unhappy developers tend to leave in search of greater happiness. Finding new hires is a slow and painful process and once on board, it takes time for them to get up to speed and start delivering on milestones.
To enable developers to spend less time fixing bugs and make them happier, there are two strategies that can be used together. Firstly, improve the quality of code that gets released, less bugs equals less time fixing them. Secondly, speeding up the debugging of problems, fixing a bug can be just a small tweak of a few lines of code, the tricky and time-consuming bit is finding which few lines of code need that tweak.
Greater Insight
Modern applications are a complex mix of containerized and serverless application components together with cloud platform services. Problems can be just inside a single service component or with how service components communicate, a complete end-to-end view of each transaction type is required to fully verify that it is working in a prompt and error free manner.
Testing is only as good as the information it provides. Complete end-to-end visibility across all application components provides the fine-grain low-level information engineers need to understand if a feature is robust enough to stand up to the rigors of a production environment. However, always expect the unexpected. No matter how stringent the testing is, something will always slip through. Those problems will be spotted sooner with greater insight, minimizing business impact. The extra insight provided by complete end to end visibility will enable developers to quickly track down those elusive few lines of code that need to be tweaked.
OpenTelemetry Tracing
Tracing is a method for tracking each transaction type as it traverses various application components in modern distributed applications. It helps developers understand the flow of requests, diagnose performance issues, identify bottlenecks, and inspect the payload at each hop.
Trace – represents the journey of a single request through the entire system. It is made up of a number of spans.
Span – is a single unit of work within a trace. It has a start time and duration together with metadata and represents a single operation of an application component.
Context Propagation – To link a number of spans together to form a trace, a trace unique identifier is passed between each application component.
Instrumentation – is the process of placing hooks in code to produce spans.
OpenTelemetry is an open-source toolkit that enables developers to expose spans for collection by a monitoring system. OpenTelemetry trace data can be collected and processed by a number of monitoring providers, therefore eliminating vendor lock-in; it is the strategic choice for observability.
Lumigo Advantage
Lumigo provides automatic OpenTelemetry instrumentation for containerized application components for some language runtimes and fully supports regular manual instrumentation of core OpenTelemetry. For serverless AWS Lambda, Lumigo provides automatic instrumentation via AWS Lambda Layers. Utilizing Lumigo’s automatic instrumentation makes it easy to adopt tracing and reduces developers’ work.
The real Lumigo advantage comes in the visualization of the collected OpenTelemetry distributed traces. Problematic requests are easily found, and the trace detail shows:
- Start time
- Duration
- HTTP method and status
- Related issues
- Log entries
- Execution tags
- Environment variables
- Payload of the request and response
Everything a developer needs to quickly resolve any issues and get back to building great new functionality. Adopting OpenTelemetry with Lumigo will reduce the new feature backlog and keep your developers happy. Sign up for a free trial now.