Application Monitoring Is The New Unit Testing

instrumentalapp.com

13 pointsillbzo15 comments

I think application monitoring might be coming up in the hype cycle, but it is not a great replacement for unit testing and selling it in that light is probably unwise.

Waiting 'til you ship to production to find a bug is a really, really, really bad idea no matter how fast you diagnose it. If your site is doing any serious scale, this could cost a year's worth of dev salary in the time it takes to make the fix.

Application monitoring is a useful tool, but the implications of overselling it will lead to some real problems for teams that aren't wise enough to see the forest for the trees.

The article title is misleading. Application monitoring is not a unit test replacement. You want both.

I agree.

Thought of one way, application monitoring is simply functional/integration testing separated out into its own SOA service. You could run an application monitoring service on your own machine, against your stack, as you code it. Instead of getting test failures, you get extremely specific health-check reports.

Says the company that is selling their application monitoring solution.

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