News
IBM Open Sources Swift App Monitoring Tool, Adds Dashboard for Node.js
- By David Ramel
- April 27, 2017
IBM, which has fully embraced Apple's Swift programming language, has open sourced a tool for monitoring the live performance of server-side Swift apps. The company also added a live dashboard for its previously open sourced tool for monitoring Node.js applications.
Application Metrics for Swift provides a Web-based dashboard that developers can use to investigate metrics such as HTTP requests, CPU usage and memory usage.
The code for the Swift tool is available on GitHub, where its description says it "instruments the Swift runtime for performance monitoring, providing the monitoring data programmatically via an API or visually with its built in dashboard." It works with Swift 3 and 64-bit runtimes on Ubuntu Linux and MacOS.
"We are developing monitoring stories across a number of runtimes that starts with the developer at his laptop and ends with large-scale deployments running in Bluemix (the IBM cloud)," IBM's Toby Corbin told ADTmag. "The aim is to make this story as seamless as possible for the user."
"The developer use case is that they include the monitoring dashboard package with their application," Corbin continued. "This will then provide them a way to always monitor their application for performance. The dashboards are free and give them a complete overview of their application over a rolling 15-minute window. Developers can use this to spot issues at development before they deploy."
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Application Metrics for Swift (source: IBM)
Although Corbin said the monitoring tools work anywhere and are suitable for everyone, they can be used in deployments to IBM's Bluemix cloud platform after being created in an IDE of their choice.
"Once they deploy their application to Bluemix, without making any changes to their code, the dashboard packages that they have been using will automatically detect that they are now in Bluemix and, if the environment has been set up with the more feature-rich monitoring service that IBM offers there, will send the same data onto that service," Corbin said.
"This Bluemix service contains the same dashboard views as the development experience but offers it across a clustered deployment adding in other features such as transaction tracking."
Last May, IBM open sourced its Applications Metrics for Node.js tool, for which the company has since provided a live dashboard, a real-time demo of which has been published on the Web, showing numerous metrics being continuously updated.
Called appmetrics-dash, its code is also available on GitHub. In addition to the aforementioned metrics, it also tracks the heap, event loop latency, average response times and several others.
"Our goal is to make monitoring something that is added right at the start of development rather than as a nice to have addition," Corbin told ADTmag. "Using our expertise in this area, we can deliver lightweight and feature rich monitoring solutions to the community improving the development lifecycle from desktop to cloud production deployments."
Coincidentally, Node.js developers also have other new open source tools for tracking their applications, as RisingStack just last week contributed its Trace monitoring/debugging tool free for use on open source projects.
More on IBM's Swift-Related Projects:
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.