Monitoring Applications

This page describes the different areas in Appian applications that you can monitor, as well as the tools you can use to support your monitoring goals.

What is application monitoring?

Application monitoring is the final stage in your DevOps journey. Application monitoring provides feedback that flows back into the planning and development stages, enabling continuous improvements to your applications. We recommend that you regularly collect and incorporate user feedback into the same early stages of the application lifecycle.

Application monitoring consists of two general areas: application performance and system resources. Monitoring these areas can help you prevent issues with your applications, as well as resolve them quickly once they are reported.

Learn more about the Monitor view.

Application performance

When monitoring an application, prioritize the most important pieces, such as process models, records, and interfaces.

If you don't know where to start, focus on these three objectives:

• Functionality: The application is functional and not producing any errors.
• Efficiency: The application is running efficiently and providing a good user experience.
• Business value: The application is providing business value.

Application performance monitoring addresses two questions to evaluate after every release:

• Is your application running?
• Is your application fast?

Is your application running?

To confirm your application is running as expected, monitor its processes and logs for errors after each release.

Process activity

Processes are at the core of most Appian applications. To understand how your application is performing, monitor the running and completed processes for errors. The Monitor view allows you to review recent process activity and process errors in a centralized place.

Appian developers can also configure alerts on process models, so a proactive warning is sent when there is a process error. When you build an autoscaled process model, Appian automatically sends alert emails if a process encounters an error.

Application logs

Log files are useful tools for identifying and troubleshooting errors that occur outside of processes, such as record view or task form errors. Logs are stored on the file system, and can be accessed through the Appian Designer navigation menu for Cloud customers.

One of the most important logs for investigating errors is the Design Error Log. This log captures every expression error that directly impacts a user. Expression errors often prevent a user from completing their work, so they are important to identify and resolve quickly.

You can also use the Appian Health Check to automatically analyze the most important logs. The Appian Health Check report identifies objects with errors, application performance bottlenecks, and other risks, such as application design best practices.

Is your application fast?

To determine whether your application is fast, monitor the response times of your records and the performance of their underlying design objects.

Record response times

Records are a key part of Appian applications. For users to have a good experience while navigating and completing their work, records need to respond quickly. Appian developers can track this metric by monitoring record response times. Appian narrows down which record interfaces have the slowest response times so you can focus your investigation there.

Design object performance

The response time of records and other user functionality depends on the performance of the underlying design objects. Appian provides individual performance details for interfaces, expression rules, decisions, record type interfaces, and web APIs. Appian developers can use performance details to troubleshoot slow response times.

Since record types are widely used throughout your application, you can also monitor the performance of queries to your record types. To view information about records query performance, go to the Query Performance tab of the Monitor view.

You can also track consolidated execution history and performance for the past 30 days through the Rule Performance page in the Admin Console.

System resources

Issues with system resources can affect your application performance. Monitor your system resources to ensure that they have sufficient capacity to support your application or that your application is not taking up more resources than necessary. System resources include CPU, RAM, disk space, and heap space.

You can monitor the system resources for your Appian installation in the following ways:

• Process model metrics: Monitor process model metrics to identify which process models are using the most memory on your system.
• Appian Health Check: Run Appian Health Check to monitor server metrics such as high CPU utilization, high heap utilization, and high disk utilization. Regularly run Appian Health Check on all of your environments, including Production.
• Server Monitoring Checklist: Use the Server Monitoring Checklist to find out what to monitor and the recommended thresholds.
• Cloud Resources: Cloud Resources in MyAppian allows you to proactively view key metrics and configuration information for your Appian Cloud environments through Appian Community.
• Appian Cloud Monitoring: Appian Cloud Monitoring tracks key metrics for your environments. Appian notifies you about any alerts and how the alerts are being resolved.

For more guidance on how to distribute system resources for your Appian environment, see Scaling Appian.

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