How do I monitor my application during launch?

In the launch phase of your application, you'll be releasing it to real users for the first time. Your primary objective is to ensure your application remains available and performant. You will also actively respond to customer feedback and bug reports in this phase.

You will need to proactively monitor your app's performance metrics and optimize its infrastructure to ensure it can handle the expected demand.

In this stage of your product's life cycle, you can expect challenges due to unexpected usage or application behavior.

Unexpected issues

When your application goes live, you may receive complaints from users who run into errors not encountered during development. In this phase, it's important to be responsive to errors and resolve them quickly.

With AppSignal, you can set up triggers to notify you when an error is recorded via platforms such as email, Discord, or Slack. This allows you to work proactively, as AppSignal notifies you of an issue before a user does.

Key metrics to monitor

During the launch phase, it's important to monitor your application's behavior closely and quickly understand where and why things are going wrong, especially when dealing with your first paying client, for example.

Luckily your application's core metric data can quickly indicate if problems arise in the launch stage.

Metric	Description	What to look out for
Throughput	How many requests our application is processing	Sudden drops or spikes in throughput could indicate performance issues or increased load.
Status codes	How your application responds to requests	Unusual or excessive occurrences of error status codes may suggest potential code issues or inadequate error handling.
Connections	A gauge of the connections being handled	A high connection count that nears maximum capacity might raise scalability issues or indicate bottlenecks.
Error rate	Percentage of requests that result in an error	A sudden increase in the error rate could indicate potential bugs or faulty application functionality.

The other stages of product development

This article is part of a series. We have a Learning Center article for each stage in the product life cycle:

• What are the stages of product development?
• How do I monitor my application during development?
• How do I monitor my application during launch?
• How do I monitor my application when scaling?
• How to maintain my application post-development

Monitor your launch with AppSignal

Join us with a free trial to start monitoring your application with AppSignal. You can be set up in as little as five minutes. If you have any questions or require help, our dev-to-dev support is on hand.