Heroku Usage Metrics Monitoring

Introduction

An effective monitoring system should cover all aspects of your infrastructure and services. You should be able to monitor the performance of your systems located both on-premises and in the cloud. This short article will focus on monitoring applications that are deployed on the popular PaaS-platform - Heroku.

To monitor your Heroku usage metrics, you can use the HG Heroku monitoring tool. This tool will automatically pull your Heroku usage metrics into the dashboards so you can get started immediately.

With the HG Heroku monitoring tool you can pull metrics from your Heroku application, as well as pipe metrics in from your AWS and or other areas of your system. Visualize your whole system on a single pane of glass!

When you first log in to your HG Heroku monitoring tool, you will get some automatically built dashboards. Check out what they look like here:

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The HG Heroku monitoring tool specializes in monitoring systems. It provides the ability to monitor services that are deployed on the most well-known PaaS-platforms. You can use our product with minimal configuration to gain in-depth insight into your environments. If you would like to learn more about it, you should get on to the app and check it out! If you want to talk to our support team, you can talk to them directly through the chat box on the bottom right hand corner.

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Heroku Usage Metrics Monitoring

Especially for providing performance metrics of applications hosted on Heroku, you should use the Hosted Graphite Heroku Monitoring add-on. This is a useful tool that gives you a simple, scalable way to measure metric data from your application deployed on Heroku. 

Installing the add-on is very simple - just a few commands in Heroku CLI. You can learn more about installing the HG Heroku Monitoring add-on from the documentation or from our article How to Monitor a Heroku App with Graphite, Grafana and StatsD. Immediately after installing the add-on, you will start to receive metrics from your applications and be able to use automated Grafana dashboards, which will become available in your Hosted Graphite account. 

From the box, the Heroku Dashboard includes such graphs as HTTP success counts, HTTP Client and Server error counts, HTTP request counts, Load Average, Memory Usage, and many others.

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Grafana is one of the most popular dashboarding and visualization tools for metrics. To meet all your specific monitoring needs, it is possible to make your own Grafana dashboards. If you want to deep dive into Grafana dashboards creation, please read our article Grafana Dashboards from Basic to Advanced.

Now, let’s demonstrate the performance of MetricFire’s Hosted Graphite and HG Heroku Monitoring add-on. After installing the add-on, it appears in your Heroku hosted application’s overview.

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We created a simple demo dashboard, that shows how correctly and stably our web-application deployed on Heroku works. It monitors HTTP client errors, HTTP request counts, and also a percentage of client errors in all requests. You can see your Heroku usage metrics right away, in the automatically generated dashboard. You’re also free to create dashboards as you like!

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As you can see from the graphs above, our application has a very high level of client errors, which may indicate a serious bug in it. In order not to miss the moment when the number of errors becomes critical, you can set up alerts. And when a certain number of errors are reached, you will be notified by e-mail or any other channel of your choice. Grafana has a very clear and effective alert functionality. More details about it can be found in the article Grafana alerting.

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Conclusion

In this article, we overviewed the capabilities and advantages of MetricFire’s Hosted Graphite and HG Heroku Monitoring add-on for Heroku usage metrics monitoring. With this monitoring stack, you can be sure that you are getting the right performance metrics from all your infrastructure and services, no matter where they are deployed.

HG Heroku Monitoring is run by MetricFire, which provides hosted versions of Prometheus and Graphite, which include storing your data for one year, a complete Grafana dashboard set up for data visualization, and much more. You can use Hosted Prometheus and Graphite with minimal configuration to gain in-depth insight into your environments. 

If you would like to learn more about it, please book a demo with us, or sign on to the free trial today.