Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By : André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha
Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By: André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha

Overview of this book

Running concurrent, fault-tolerant applications that scale is a very demanding responsibility. After learning the abstractions that Elixir gives us, developers are able to build such applications with inconceivable low effort. There is a big gap between playing around with Elixir and running it in production, serving live requests. This book will help you fll this gap by going into detail on several aspects of how Elixir works and showing concrete examples of how to apply the concepts learned to a fully ?edged application. In this book, you will learn how to build a rock-solid application, beginning by using Mix to create a new project. Then you will learn how the use of Erlang's OTP, along with the Elixir abstractions that run on top of it (such as GenServer and GenStage), that allow you to build applications that are easy to parallelize and distribute. You will also master supervisors (and supervision trees), and comprehend how they are the basis for building fault-tolerant applications. Then you will use Phoenix to create a web interface for your application. Upon fnishing implementation, you will learn how to take your application to the cloud, using Kubernetes to automatically deploy, scale, and manage it. Last, but not least, you will keep your peace of mind by learning how to thoroughly test and then monitor your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
5
Demand-Driven Processing
Index

Chapter 11. Keeping an Eye on Your Processes

With our application running on the cloud, we should have constant visibility at any given moment about what's happening. To accomplish this, we'll configure two different mechanisms to obtain information about the running ElixirDrip instances:

  • A Prometheus server constantly collecting metrics about the running application and exposing them through a Grafana dashboard
  • A way to run the Erlang observer tool while connected to the running Erlang nodes, in order to analyze the Erlang VM's overall status and the existing running processes
  • Two ways to tap into what's happening with our production system: Profiling and tracing functions from our application

Let's start by understanding how Prometheus works and how it is a good fit for the established ElixirDrip architecture.