Have you ever wondered what happens after your application or platform goes live? Traditionally, support becomes one of the most critical challenges in the post-launch stage. This is when it truly shows how robust and well-built your system really is.
At Imagine Apps, we always recommend—and run—load and quality tests as a preventive measure. However, once the platform is live, the appearance of a bug can trigger a process that, honestly, is quite frustrating for everyone involved.
The Traditional Path to Fixing an Error
When a failure occurs, resolving it usually follows these steps:
Diagnosis: Identifying what’s happening and, more importantly, where. Surprisingly, this is often the most time-consuming phase. It involves reproducing the issue, reviewing logs, or analyzing the developer’s local environment.
Solution Design: Hypotheses are formed about the root cause, and the impact of each possible solution is evaluated to determine the best approach.
Experimentation and Testing: The chosen solution is implemented and rigorously tested in development or local environments to ensure it works as expected.
Deployment (Hotfix): Once validated, the fix is deployed to the production environment.
Depending on the complexity of the issue, this entire cycle can take anywhere from several hours to several days.
The Impact of Observability: From Reactive to Proactive
This is where observability changes the game. Instead of waiting for errors to happen and users to report them, observability is a proactive system that alerts you when something fails—where it failed, and with what impact.
Think of a common use case for a marketplace like the ones we build at Imagine Apps: payments. If your billing system fails, you simply don’t sell. It’s the equivalent of closing your business doors for an unknown number of hours.
An observability platform like Grafana allows you to detect and fix these issues quickly, accelerating the deployment of solutions to production. This can reduce resolution times from days to hours—or even minutes.
What Do You Need to Implement an Observability System?
Commitment: (Yes, really!) The first step is deciding to improve your processes.
Proper Error Handling in Code: Everything starts with code that knows how to log and manage failures effectively.
Log Storage Policies: It’s essential to define rules for storing logs and optimizing costs. For example, you probably don’t need to keep error logs from several weeks ago.
Implementation and Configuration: A clear process is required to configure tools, define alerts, and establish what “normal” looks like for your system.
If this resonates with you and you’re looking to optimize your application support, we’re ready to explore how we can help. Get in touch with us.
