Tag: Debugging

11 Features in Node.js 18 you need to try

Posted on by Simon Helberg

Node.js 18 LTS is now available. What’s new?

Node.js 18 was released on the 19th of April this year. You can read more in the official blog post release or in the OpenJS Blog announcement. The community couldn’t be more excited!

Here at NodeSource,releases are a big deal. As a team of experts, enthusiasts, and core contributors to the open-source project, we love seeing the progress of Node! We are also one of the primary distributors of the runtime and have been since version 0.x (2014).

Developers download and use our binaries worldwide for their production environments (over 100m a year and growing!). We are incredibly proud to support this important piece of the Node ecosystem in addition to building and supporting customers on our Node.js platform – N|Solid.

“If you use Linux, we recommend using a NodeSource installer.” – From the NPM Documentation

If you want to lend a hand, we welcome your ideas or solutions contact us, or if you would like to help us continue supporting open source, you can contribute with an issue here.

Overall, the community is looking forward to this release with many new features and other benefits in addition to the official release earlier this year that included:

Security: Upgrading to OpenSSL 3.0

APIs: Fetch API is Promise based, providing a cleaner and more concise syntax.

If you are interested in thinking about the future of Node, we recommend checking out The next-10 group. They are doing some great work thinking about the strategic direction for the next 10 years of Node.js. Their technical priorities are:

Modern HTTP, WebAssembly, and Types.
ECMAScript modules and Observability

_OpenJS Collaborator Summit 2022
_

But now I’m sure you want to get into the changes in v18. What has improved, and what are the new features? That’s what you’re here for 😉. So let us explain 👇

Hydrogen. What is it?

The codename for this release is ‘Hydrogen’. Support for Node.js 18 will last until April 2025. The name comes from the periodic table, and they have been used in alphabetical order (Argon, Boron, Carbon, Dubnium, Erbium…) 🤓 Read more in StackOverflow.

LTS?

According to the Node.js blog, the “LTS version guarantees that the critical bugs will be fixed for a total of 30 months and Production applications should only use Active LTS, or Maintenance LTS releases”. – https://nodejs.dev/en/about/releases/

In short, it focuses on stability and being a more reliable application after allowing a reasonable time to receive feedback from the community and testing its implementation at any scale.

_Nodejs Releases Screenshot 2022
_

How do I know what version of Node and LTS I have?

You can easily do it by typing in your console:

$ node –version

Run the following to retrieve the name of the LTS release you are using:

$ node -p process.release.lts

_Note: _ The previous property only exists if the release is an LTS. Otherwise, it returns nothing.

If you want to be aware of the release planning in the Node.js community, you can check here: Node.js Release Schedule.

What’s new in Node.js 18?

Contributors are constantly working to improve the runtime, introduce more features, and improve developer experience and usability. Today as the worldwide community uses JS for developing API-driven web applications and serverless cloud development, the changes in this new LTS version are important to understand.

In honor of the number 11 (__#funfact__ Undici means ‘eleven’ in Italian), we decided to make our top 11 Node.js 18 features:

Fetch API
🧪- – watch
🧪 OpenSSL 3 Support
🧪 node:test module
Prefix-only core Modules
🧪 Web Streams API
Other Global APIs: Blob and BrodcastChannel.
V8 Version 10.1
Toolchain and Compiler Upgrades
HTTP Timeouts
Undici Library

The idea of this blog post is to relevel the functionalities one by one, so let’s start:

Feature 1: Native Fetch API in Node.js 18

Finally, v18 provides native fetch functionality in Node.js. This is a standardized web API for conducting HTTP or other types of network requests. Previously Node.js did not support it by default. Because JavaScript is utilized in so many areas, this is fantastic news for the entire ecosystem.

Example:

Feature 2:–watch

Using –watch, your application will automatically restart when an imported file is changed. Just like nodemon. And you can use –watch-path to specify which path should be observed.

Also, these flags cannot be combined with –check, –eval, –interactive, or when used in REPL (read–eval–print loop) mode. It just won’t work.

You can now use Node Watch index on your file name to start watching your files without having to install anything.

Feature 3: OpenSSL 3 Support

OpenSSL is an open-source implementation of, among other things, SSL and TLS protocols for securing communication.

One key feature of OpenSSL 3.0 is the new FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) module. FIPS is a set of US government requirements for governing cryptographic usage in the public sector.

More information is available in the OpenSSL3 blog post.

Feature 4: The Experimental node:test

The node:test module facilitates the creation of JavaScript tests that report results in TAP (Test Anything Protocol) format. The TAP output is extensively used and makes the output easier to consume.

import test from node:test

This module is only available under the node:scheme.
Read more in Node.js Docs

This test runner is still in development and is not meant to replace other complete alternatives such as Jest or Mocha, but it provides a quick way to execute a test suite without additional third-party libraries. The test runner supports features like subtests, test skipping, callback tests, etc.

node:test and –test

node:assert

The following is an example of how to use the new test runner.

More information may be found in the Node.js API docs.

Feature 5: Prefix-only core Modules

A new way to ‘import’ modules that leverages a ‘node:’ prefix, which makes it immediately evident that the modules are from Node.js core

To learn more about this functionality, we invite you to read Colin Ihrig‘s article Node.js 18 Introduces Prefix-Only Core Modules.

Feature 6: Experimental Web Streams API

A Web Streams API is a set of streams API. Also experimental, it allows JavaScript to access streams of data received over the network programmatically and process them as desired. This means Stream APIs are now available on the global scope. This would help send the data packets in readable and writable streams.

Methods available are as follows,

ReadableStream

ReadableStreamDefaultReader

ReadableStreamBYOBReader

ReadableStreamBYOBRequest

ReadableByteStreamController

ReadableStreamDefaultController

TransformStream

TransformStreamDefaultController

WritableStream

WritableStreamDefaultWriter

WritableStreamDefaultController

ByteLengthQueuingStrategy

CountQueuingStrategy

TextEncoderStream

TextDecoderStream

CompressionStream

DecompressionStream

Feature 7: Other Global APIs

The following APIs in the Node v18 upgrade are exposed on the global scope: Blob and BroadcastChannel.

Feature 8: V8 Version 10.1

Node.js runs with the V8 engine from the Chromium open-source browser. This engine has been upgraded to version 10.1, which is part of the recent update in Chromium 101.

New array methods for finding the last element and index of an array. Array methods findLast and findLastIndex are now available.
Internationalization support: Intl.Locale and the Intl.supportedValuesOf functions.
Improving the performance of class fields and private class methods.
The data format of the v8.serialize function has changed (No compatible with earlier versions of Node.js.)

Keep an eye out here.

Feature 9: Toolchain and Compiler Upgrades

Node.js always provides pre-built binaries for various platforms. For every latest release, toolchains are evaluated and elevated whenever required. Node.js provides pre-built binaries for several different platforms. For each major release, the minimum toolchains are assessed and raised where appropriate.

Pre-built binaries for Linux are now built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 and are compatible with Linux distributions based on Glibc 2.28 or later, for example, Debian 10, RHEL 8, Ubuntu 20.04.
Pre-built binaries for macOS now require macOS 10.15 or later.
For AIX, the minimum supported architecture has been raised from Power 7 to Power 8.

Note: Build-time user-land snapshot(Experimental)

Users can build a Node.js binary with a custom V8 startup using the
–-node-snapshot-main flag of the configure script.

Feature 10: HTTP Timeouts

The http.server timeouts have changed:

headersTimeout (the time allowed for an HTTP request header to be parsed) is set to 60000 milliseconds (60 seconds).

requestTimeout (the timeout used for an HTTP request) is set to 300000 milliseconds (5 minutes) by default.

Feature 11: Undici Library in Node.js

Undici is an official Node team library, although it’s more like an HTTP 1.1 full-fledged client designed from the ground up in Node.js.

Keep alive by default.
LIFO scheduling
No pipelining
Unlimited connections
Can follow redirected (opt-in)

Of note, we support and love Lizz‘s work, so we recommend you check out her fantastic talk in Nodeconf.EU about New and Exciting features in Node.js to understand more about this feature.

Other Features/Changes:

The project undoubtedly has some great challenges in the near future to continue growing and maintaining its leading position in the ecosystem. These are some of the upcoming features. Most of them are experimental; without being the only ones to discuss, there is much work and proposals from an active community such as the Node.js Community.

Default DNS resolution
ECMAScript modules improvements
Improved support for AbortController and AbortSignal
Updated Platform Support
Async Hooks
Direct Network Imports
Build-time user-land snapshot
Support for JSON Import Assertions
Unflagging of JSON modules (experimental)
Support for HTTPS and HTTP imports
Diagnostic Channel
Trace Events
WASI

You can check the full changelog here.

Final Remarks

Node.js 12 will go End-of-Life in April 2022.
Node.js 14 (LTS) or Node.js 16 (LTS) or Later Node.js 18 will be LTS.
Node.js 18 will be promoted to Long-term Support (LTS) in October 2022 (NOW).
After being promoted to LTS, Node.js 18 will be supported until April 2025.

Upgrade Now!

Moving to the LTS version is the best decision for you to include the following improvements in your development workflow:

FetchAPI and Web Streams
V8: New advanced features, array methods, improvements, and enhancements.
Test runner without the need for third-party packages.
Deprecated APIs: Check the list here

Enhancement in Intl.Locale API.
Performance improvement in both class fields and private class methods.

Migration

To migrate your version of Node, follow these steps:

For Linux and Mac users, follow these commands to upgrade to the latest version of Node. The module n makes version management easy:

npm install n -g

For the latest stable version:

n stable

For the latest version:

n latest

Windows Users
Visit the Node.js download page to install the new version of Node.js.

Special Thanks

With 99 contributors and 1348 commits Node.js 18 LTS came to life 🎉. Special thanks to @_rafaelgss @BethGriggs_ @_richard_lau_ To make this release happen 💚

$ nvm install 18.12.0

And thank you to all of Node.js project contributors. Our complete admiration and support for such incredible work 💪.

NodeSource Node.js Binary Distributions

NodeSource, from the beginning, was created with a great commitment to the developers’ community, which is why it has provided documentation for using the NodeSource Node.js Binary Distributions via .rpm, .deb as well as their setup and support scripts.

If you are looking for NodeSource’s Enterprise-grade Node.js platform, N|Solid, please visit https://downloads.nodesource.com/, and for detailed information on installing and using N|Solid, please refer to the N|Solid User Guide.

We are also aware that as a start-up, you want ‘Enterprise-grade’ at a startup price, this is why we extend our product to small and medium-sized companies, startups, and non-profit organizations with N|Solid SaaS.

Useful Links / References

You can upgrade to NodeJS v18 using the official download link

New Node.js features bring a global fetch API & test runner. Check out the Node version 16-18 report

Welcome Node.js 18 by RedHat
Announcing a new –experimental-modules

A new jQuery release for Xmas

Posted on by Simon Helberg

#​619 — December 16, 2022

Read on the Web

🎄 This is the final issue of the year – we’ll be back on January 6, 2023. We hope you have a fantastic holiday season, whether or not you are celebrating, and we’ll see you for a look back at 2022 in the first week of January 🙂
__
Peter Cooper and the Cooperpress team

JavaScript Weekly

Announcing SvelteKit 1.0 — Svelte is a virtual DOM-free, compiled ahead of time, frontend UI framework with many fans. SvelteKit introduces a framework and tooling around Svelte to build complete webapps. This release post explains some of its approach and how it differs to other systems.

The Svelte Team

Dr. Axel Tackles Two Proposals: Iterator Helpers and Set Methods — Here’s something to get your teeth into! Dr. Axel takes on two promising ECMAScript proposals and breaks down what they’re about and why they’ll (hopefully) become useful to JavaScript developers. The first tackles iterator helpers (new utility methods for working with iterable data) and the second tackles Set methods which will extend ES6’s Set object.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

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🧈 ButterCMS sponsor

🏆  The Best of Node Weekly in 2022 — In this week’s issue of Node Weekly (our Node.js-focused sister newsletter) we looked back at the most popular items of the year, including the Tao of Node, an array of JavaScript testing best practices, and the most popular Node.js frameworks in 2022.

Node Weekly Newsletter

jQuery 3.6.2 Released — Humor me. You might not be using jQuery anymore, but it’s (still) the most widely deployed JavaScript library and it’s fantastic to see it being maintained.

jQuery Foundation

IN BRIEF:

Node 19.3.0 (Current) has been released to bring npm up to v9.2. Breaking changes in v9.x warrant this update and the release post explains the current policy around npm’s ongoing inclusion in Node.

ƛ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) has gained a new JavaScript backend meaning the reference Haskell compiler can now emit JavaScript and be used more easily to build front-end apps.

GitHub is rolling out secrets scanning to all public repos for free.

The New Stack reflects on 2022 as a ‘golden year’ for JavaScript and some of the developments we’ve seen. We’ll be doing our own such roundup in the next issue.

RELEASES:

Node.js 16.19.0 (LTS) and 14.21.2 (LTS)

Chart.js 4
↳ Canvas-based chart library. (Samples.)

PouchDB 8.0
↳ CouchDB-inspired syncing database.

SWR 2.0 – React data-fetching library.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Why Cypress v12 is a Big Deal — A practical example-led love letter of sorts to how the latest version of the popular Cypress ‘test anything that runs in a browser’ library makes testing frontend apps smoother than before.

Gleb Bahmutov

Five Challenges to Building an Isomorphic JS Library — When it comes to JavaScript, “isomorphic” means code or libraries that run both on client and server runtimes with minimal adaptations.

Nick Fahrenkrog (Doordash)

▶  A Podcast for Candid Chats on Product, Business & Leadership — Join Postlight leaders & guests as they discuss topics like running great meetings & creating solid product launches.

The Postlight Podcast sponsor

Next, Nest, Nuxt… Nust? — “This blog post is for everyone looking for their new favorite JavaScript backend framework.” If the names of frameworks are all starting to blur together in your head, this is for you. Marius explains just what systems like Next and Gatsby do and touches on a few differences.

Marius Obert (Twilio)

Calculating the Maximum Diagonal Distance in a Given Collection of GeoJSON Features using Turf.js — This is cool. Turf.js is a geospatial analysis library, by the way.

Piotr Jaworski

Optimize Interaction to Next Paint — How to optimize for the experimental Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric — a way to assess a page’s overall responsiveness to user interactions.

Jeremy Wagner & Philip Walton (Google)

Need to Upgrade to React 18.2? Don’t Have Time? Our Experts Can Help — Stuck in dependency hell? We’ve been there. Hire our team of experts to upgrade deps, gradually paying off tech debt.

UpgradeJS.com – JavaScript Upgrade Services by OmbuLabs sponsor

How We Configured pnpm and Turborepo for Our Monorepo

Pierre-Louis Mercereau (NHost)

Rendering Emails with Svelte

Gautier Ben Aim

🛠 Code & Tools

Wretch 2.3: A Wrapper Around fetch with an Intuitive Syntax — A long standing, mature library that makes fetch a little more extensible with a fluent API. Check the examples.

Julien Elbaz

SWR 2.0: Improved React Hooks for Data Fetching — The second major release of SWR (Stale-While-Revalidate) includes new mutation APIs, new developer tools, as well as improved support for concurrent rendering.

Ding, Liu, Kobayashi, and Xu

Don’t Let Your Issue Tracker Be a Four-Letter Word. Use Shortcut

Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io) sponsor

vanilla-tilt.js 1.8: A Smooth 3D Tilting Effect Library — No dependencies and simple to use and customize. GitHub repo.

Șandor Sergiu

visx: Airbnb’s Low Level Visualization React Components — Bring your own state management, animation library, or CSS-in-JS.. visx can slot into any React setup. Demos.

Airbnb

Scene.js 1.7: A CSS Timeline-Based Animation Library — Plenty of examples on the site. Has components for React, Vue and Svelte.

Daybrush

PortalVue 3.0
↳ Feature-rich portal plugin for Vue 3.

Kea 3.1
↳ Composable state management for React.

jest-puppeteer 6.2
↳ Run tests using Jest + Puppeteer.

NodeBB 2.7 – Node.js based forum software.

Pino 8.8 – Fast JSON-oriented logger.

💻 Jobs

Software Engineer — Join our “kick ass” team. Our software team operates from 17 countries and we’re always looking for more exceptional engineers.

Stickermule

Developer Relations Manager — Join the CKEditor team to build community around an Open Source project used by millions of users around the world 🚀

CKEditor

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It’s free for job-seekers.

Hired

🎁 And one for fun

Snow.js: Add a Snow Effect to a Web Page — Well, it’s that time of the year (in some parts of the world!) If you’re more interested in how the effect is made, it’s inspired by this CodePen example built around some fancy CSS.

Or if you’re a bit more childish, you could always put Fart.js on your site.. 🙈

Merry Christmas to you all and we’ll see you again in 2023!

Enhance Observability with Opentelemetry tracing – Part 1

Posted on by Simon Helberg

Recently, conversations have been increasing around OpenTelemetry; it is gaining more and more momentum in Node.js development circles, but what is it? How can we take advantage of the key concepts and implement them in our projects?

Of note, NodeSource is a supporter of OpenTelemetry, and we have recently implemented full support of the open-source standard in our product N|Solid. It allows us to make our powerful Node.js insights accessible via the protocol.

Opentelemetry is a relatively recent vendor-agnostic emerging standard that began in 2019 when OpenCensus and OpenTracing combined to form OpenTelemetry – seeking to provide a single, well-supported integration surface for end-to-end distributed tracing telemetry. In 2021, they released V1. 0.0, offering stability guarantees for the approach.

And most important, OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability project/framework with a collection of software development kits (SDKs), APIs, and tools for instrumentation from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

W3C Trace Context is the standard format for OpenTelemetry. Cloud providers are expected to adopt this standard, providing a vendor-neutral way to propagate trace IDs through their services. Organizations use OpenTelemetry to send collected telemetry data to a third-party system for analysis.

But to break down its history a bit, we think it’s important to understand the concept of __Observability__.

At Nodesource, as you likely know, we work daily in Observability, focusing exclusively on the Node.js runtime and N|Solid from N|Solid 4.8.0 supports some OpenTelemetry features. But before getting deeper in OTEL, it is important to understand Observability and try to resolve this important question: What is Observability?

Setting the foundations to talk about OpenTelemetry

It’s important to understand that when we talk about Observability, we need first to know what questions we seek to answer or clarify when detailing a system.

The first question often asked is __why__ my application has specific behavior. And to solve this and other questions, we first must instrument our system so that our application can emit signals, that is, traces, metrics, and logs. When we correctly do this, we have the necessary information needed.

Observability is the ability to measure the internal states of a system by examining its outputs. – Splunk

Detailing a system through Data Collection: Telemetry Data

Your systems and apps need proper tooling to collect the appropriate telemetry data to achieve Observability.
But what is the telemetry data that we need?

The three key concepts are :

Metrics

Logs

Traces

Ok, let’s define each of these concepts:

Metrics

__Metrics__: are aggregations over a period of time of numeric data about your infrastructure or application. Examples include system error rate, CPU utilization, and request rate for a given service.

As quoted by isitobservable.io, OpenTelemetry has three metric instruments :

__Counter__: a value that is summed over time (similar to the Prometheus counter)
__Measure__: a value that is aggregated over time (a value over some defined range)
__Observer__: captures a current set of values ​​at a given time (like a gauge in Prometheus)

The context is still very important, along with metric information like name, description, unit, kind (counter, observer, measure), label, aggregation, and time.

Logs

__Logs__: A Log is a timestamped message emitted by services or other components. They are not necessarily associated with any particular user request or transaction, but they become more valuable when they are.

The logical line would tell us that here we must jump to traces because it is part of the three key concepts. But before defining what a trace is, we must zoom in on the concept of __Span__.

Span

__Span__: A Span represents a unit of work or operation. It tracks specific operations that a request makes, painting a picture of what happened during the time in which that operation was executed.

A span is the building block of a trace and is a named, timed operation representing a piece of the workflow in the distributed system. All traces are composed of Spans.

Traces

Traces__: A Trace records the paths taken by requests (made by an application or end-user) as they __propagate through multi-service architectures, like microservice and serverless applications. It is also known as Distributed Trace. A trace is almost always an assessment of end-to-end performance.

Without tracing, it is challenging to pinpoint the cause of performance problems in a distributed system.

Suppose you realize we broke into the three pillars of Observability when introducing the concept of Span. In that case, however, the three pillars and Span conform to what is known as __Telemetry Data__, which are simple __signals emitted from applications and resources about their internal state.__

The core concept of Context Propagation

When we want to correlate events across our services’ boundaries, we look for a context that helps us identify the current trace and Span. But context is not the only thing we need; we also need __propagation__.

If you are with us following the article carefully, you will realize that in the definition of trace, we talk about the word __‘propagation’__. You might wonder what this means.

Propagation is how context is bundled and transferred in and across services, often via HTTP headers. Now, With these clear concepts, we can begin to understand the concept of __Context Propagation__.

A critical functionality required to implement Distributed Tracing is the concept of Context Propagation. We can define it as a mechanism for storing state and accessing data across the lifespan of a distributed transaction, either across execution contexts inside a process or across the boundaries of the services that conform to our system.

For In Process propagation__, we typically use something like the __AsyncLocalStorage class from the async_hooks module.

Whereas Across Processes__, it will depend on the IPC protocol used. For example, for HTTP, there’s the Trace Context specification from the _W3C__, which defines the _traceparent and tracestate headers to propagate tracing info.

Getting into a Distributed Application

Let’s say we have a distributed application like the one in the picture. It has 4 Nodejs services: API, auth, Service1 and Service2, and 1 database.

Imagine we’re having intermittent performance issues. They could come from several points:
– Database access
– Network link status,
– DNS request latency, etc.
Finding where exactly may become a very hard and time-consuming task; the harder, the more complex the system is.

Distributed tracing will help us A LOT with that, as we’ll generate tracing information on every point of the distributed system (A, B, C, D, and E). Not only that, but while the request goes through all the services, thanks to Context Propagation, some ‘tracing state’ will be passed along so all the tracing info can be linked to the very same request.

Instrument your system

To get visibility into the performance and behaviors of the different microservices, we need to instrument the code with OpenTelemetry to generate traces. But first, let’s define what Instrumentation is…

Automatic Instrumentation

With __Automatic Instrumentation__, our instrumentation libraries will automatically take the configuration provided (through code or environment variables) and do most of the work.

In the following example, using the OpenTelemetry SDK, we show how we can automatically generate spans for every HTTP transaction handled by the Nodejs HTTP core module.

Manual Instrumentation

__Manual instrumentation__, on the other hand, while requiring more work on the user/developer side, enables far more options for customization, from naming various components within OpenTelemetry (for example, spans and the traces ) to add your own attributes, specific exception handling, and more. See the following example shows how to manually generate a Span using the OpenTelemetry SDK.

How to Implement Opentelemetry in my project?

The way we historically would implement a typical observability pipeline is shown in the following picture.

In this case, having all that data at your disposal is great and can give us a valuable overview of our system, but unless we are able to correlate the observability signals somehow: metrics, logs, and traces, we won’t be able to have the best of it.
OpenTelemetry comes to solve this problem. The solution is going to come from correlating these signals. This can be done by applying the same concept of Context Propagation that was used for Traces to Metrics and Logs, so in this case, identifiers such as the trace_id and the span_id are associated with those signals.

OpenTelemetry spanId and traceId can correlate Logs and Metrics with a specific Span in a Trace.

Opentelemetry Components

OpenTelemetry is much more… Before finishing this article, it is important to describe the different components of OpenTelemetry.

Note: For more detail, read the specification overview of the Opentelemetry project.

OpenTelemetry API: It provides an API, which defines data types and operations for generating and correlating tracing, metrics, and logging data.

💚 From N|Solid 4.8.0 we provide an implementation of the OpenTelemetry TraceAPI, allowing users to instrument their own code using the de-facto standard API.

OpenTelemetry SDK: It provides Language-specific implementations of the API.

OpenTelemetry OTLP: A protocol to transport the Telemetry Data.

💚 With N|Solid 4.8.0 we support many instrumentation modules available in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem. Supporting exporting traces using the OpenTelemetry Protocol(OTLP) over HTTP.

OpenTelemetry Collector: To receive, process, and export Telemetry data.

💚 In N|Solid 4.8.0 is now possible to send N|Solid Runtime monitoring information (metrics and traces) to backends supporting the OpenTelemetry standard like multiple APMS (Dynatrace, Datadog, Newrelic).

OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions: To have well-defined naming for the attributes associated with the signals: (service.name, http. port, etc.)

We know that there may be other key concepts to develop around Opentelemetry, and for this reason, we invite you to visit the direct website of the project or the Github Repo directly.

This introductory article gives us the basis for sharing a demo we prepared for NodeConf.EU, where we apply open-source tools to implement Opentelemetry in your project. We invite you to stay tuned for our next blog post. 😉 Wait for the second part!

Conclusions

Traces are really useful for understanding modern distributed systems.
We build better software when we get the best of our traces.
With OTel (Opentelemetry), we’re able to have maximized insights and answer future questions without having to make any code changes.
#OTel provides interoperability with observability tools.
Collect and correlate telemetry data is easy if you follow the OpenTelemetry framework.
As far as we know, the OpenTelemetry community is working hard to develop support for metrics and logs. Waiting for news soon! 🤞
Note: If you want to learn more about OpenTelemetry in Javascript, click HERE

To start getting more value out of your traces and metrics, you can use Opentelemetry with N|Solid back-end.

Achieve Your Performance Goals With N|Solid

We know that you want to get the best out of your application and to do it professionally, you will surely need a great ally to help you with various tools without affecting your performance. We do not want to stay in a ‘marketing speech’ where we tell you that we are the best… you can 👀check it directly here with this Open Source tool that also includes OTEL Results.

We’d love to hear more from you! 💚
– Feel free to TRY N|Solid and get in touch with us on Twitter at @nodesource.

Top 10 N|Solid —APM for Node— features you needed to use

Posted on by Simon Helberg

Nearly a year ago, we launched N|Solid SaaS, and although there are still a few months to go before our anniversary, we wanted to share the top 10 features ofN|Solid that make us proud every day of what we have built.

N|Solid is the best way to monitor and secure your Node.js applications (including in production) that are trusted by developers, software teams, and global enterprise companies. It has an array of features like other APMs, but we go deeper with our insights and are more performant than all others. We created N|Solid to help companies build the best software with Node and save time resolving issues. Because there is significant risk in deploying open-source applications without knowing the security gaps, we provide features to prevent security issues and insights for resolving them.

We are confident we’re the best APM solution for Node. js-based applications; if you are using Node, you should be using our runtime. We’re a complete product/solution, not just an APM focused on Node.

About N|Solid

N|Solid is a toolset built on Node.js that provides a number of enhancements to improve troubleshooting, debugging, managing, monitoring, and securing your Node.js applications. It is 100% compatible with the open-source project and requires no instrumentation of your code.

N|Solid Console

N|Solid provides a web-based console, ‘N|Solid Console’ to monitor your applications but also allows you to introspect your Node.js applications, in the same way, directly in the CLI if you run the __N|Solid Runtime__.

N|Solid Runtime

If you want to introspect your Node.js applications and have the most control from your command line, you’ll run them with the N|Solid Runtime, which is shaped similarly to a typical Node.js runtime but provides some additional executables.

To install N|Solid Runtime, download and unpack an N|Solid Runtime from the N|Solid download site.

Why N|Solid is an APM

Traditionally, the acronym APM has been used to refer to application performance management. However, in recent years it also refers, perhaps more correctly, to Application Performance Monitoring, and that is exactly what N|Solid does, which is why its categorization in this spectrum of applications is correct. Something important to highlight is that it is not a polyglot APM; it is clearly an APM specialized in Node.js, which has always been our focus.

While other APMs support Node.js, none provide the level of insights N|Solid can. In many cases, the APMs can become a part of the problem by consuming significant resources due to how they are designed. But don’t take our word for it. You can check it with real data through this OS Project — The APM’s Benchmark tool —.

APM’s Benchmark Tool – Overview Screen

N|Solid APM (Self-hosted or SaaS) is the best observability and insights tool to manage Node performance and security, and the full platform access enables you to really #KnowyourNode

In this blog post, we want to wrap it up our product series, briefly telling you about the 10 main features of N|Solid. We hope you like it and it helps you get the most out of our product.

[1] Project & Applications Monitoring in N|Solid

Visually view application behavior and identify performance and security issues.

With Project & Application Monitoring, you can track a website or any application based on Node.js. This feature allows you to collect your log data to help developers detect bugs and process use, track downtime, and improve performance to be consistent and focused on the end-user experience.

N|Solid APM – Projects & Applications View

This area is mainly made up of 3 main views that use the Projects and Applications and Process Monitoring:
– Applications view
– Application summary view
– Processes view

Read more about this feature here: https://nsrc.io/ProjectApplicationsMonitoringNS

[2] Process Monitoring in N|Solid

Access deep performance insights.

The applications and associated processes are displayed in this feature of our N|Solid Console. You can visualize Event Loop Estimated Lag, Heap Used, or CPU Used, for example, and you can correlate these metrics in a planimetry. You can also select a specific process to know its general status and vulnerabilities and choose a specific graphic to visually represent the selected information.

N|Solid APM – Process Monitoring

Read more here: https://nsrc.io/ProcessMonitoringNS

[3] CPU Profiling in N|Solid

Shows what functions consume CPU% and how resources are allocated.

CPU Profiling allows you to understand where opportunities exist to improve your Node processes’ speed and load capacity. This feature shows what functions consume CPU% and how resources are allocated.

N|Solid APM – Flamegraph-CPU Profile

Read more here: https://nsrc.io/CPUProfilingNS

[4] Worker Threads in N|Solid

View In-depth metrics of each worker thread.

Worker threads are treated first class and have the same access to CPU profiles, snapshots, etc. as the main process. We are the only solution that has full support worker threads.

View In-depth metrics of each worker thread. With this feature, identify opportunities to improve the performance of CPU-intensive work.

Read more here: https://nsrc.io/WorkerThreadsNS

[5] Capture Heap Snapshots in N|Solid

Understand where and how memory is being used

Taking heap snapshots is a great way to help identify the underlying problem when faced with a memory leak or performance issue. In this way, you will be able to understand where and how memory is being used, and you will be able to quickly resolve memory leaks and performance issues.

N|Solid APM – Capture Heap Snapshots

Read more here: https://nsrc.io/HeapSnapshotsNS

[6] Memory Anomaly Detection in N|Solid

View In-depth metrics of each worker thread.

Identify Memory anomalies taken with a more accurate detection method.
– Insights and metrics are historical, before and after the incident happened.
– Get anomalies at different heap usage levels.
– Detect correlation between sets of memory-specific metrics.
– Filter results by specific processes inside your application.

N|Solid APM – Memory Anomaly Detection

Read more here: https://nsrc.io/MemoryAnomalyNS

[7] Vulnerability Scanning – NCM – in N|Solid

Know all of the potential vulnerabilities within your application.

NCM is security, compliance, and curation tool around the 3rd-Party Node.js & JavaScript package ecosystem. It provides protection against security vulnerabilities and licensing compliance issues and provides risk assessment when working with a 3rd-party ecosystem.

The N|Solid Console can be configured to perform periodic verification of all packages loaded by all N|Solid processes.

N|Solid APM – Vulnerability Scanning from N|Solid Runtime

NCM provides

Actionable insights.
Offline vulnerability scanning.
Prevent processes in an application from launching if they have vulnerabilities with “strict mode.”
NCM-CI (Service Tokens and CI Processes) customization.

__Note__: NCM can be viewed from 3 locations: full overview, per application, and per process.

Read more here: https://nsrc.io/VulnerabilityScanningNS

[8] HTTP Tracing support in N|Solid

Enables the ability to debug application latency and other issues.

HTTP tracing gathers throughput and the lifecycle of any HTTP, DNS, or other types of request.
– Debug latency issues, monitor your services, and more with the collected information.
– See in a timeline graph the density of the number of tracked spans.
– Inspect each span for more detail on the collected trace.
– Filter the results by the attributes of a span and delimit them to the time range.

N|Solid APM – HTTP Tracing Support

Read more here: https://nsrc.io/HTTPTracingNS

[9] Global Alerts & Integrations in N|Solid

Be aware of issues and vulnerabilities. Pre-configured API integrations with key 3rd party services.

You can use automation to trigger alerts over integrations, CPU profiles, or heap snapshots. Be aware of issues and vulnerabilities, Pre-configured API integrations with key 3rd party services.

So when creating the heap snapshot, for example, I will have the notification directly in Slack of my N|Solid Console’s behavior; from there, I can check it by opening the Console.

N|Solid APM – Global Alerts & Integrations – Slack Example

Read more here: https://nsrc.io/GlobalAlertsIntegrationsNS

[10] Distributed Tracing in N|Solid

Better understand the factors that affect an application’s latency.

Distributed tracing is a core component of Observability mainly used by site reliability engineers (SREs) but also by developers and is recommended in that way to obtain the greatest benefits as a team in charge of modern distributed software.

As your system scales, you’ll need to add a tracing and refine sampling capabilities, which means getting the context to understand the complexity of distributed architectures.

N|Solid APM – Distributed Tracing

Distributed Tracing provides several solutions, which include:

Monitoring system health
Latency trend and outliers
Control flow graph
Asynchronous process visualization
Debugging microservices

Read more here: https://nsrc.io/DistributedTracingNS

Still, on our roadmap, we are planning and executing features that will shake up the ecosystem in the coming months. Stay tuned! 😎

Top Ten Features In N|Solid

🧭Projects & Applications Monitoring in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/ProjectApplicationsMonitoringNS

🌌 Process Monitoring in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/ProcessMonitoringNS

🔍 CPU Profiling in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/CPUProfilingNS

🕵️‍♂️ Worker Threads Monitoring in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/WorkerThreadsNS

📸 Capture Heap Snapshots in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/HeapSnapshotsNS

🚨 Memory Anomaly Detection in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/MemoryAnomalyNS

🚩 Vulnerability Scanning & 3rd party Modules Certification in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/VulnerabilityScanningNS

👣 HTTP Tracing Support in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/HTTPTracingNS

⏰ Global Alerts & Integrations in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/GlobalAlertsIntegrationsNS

🪄 Distributed Tracing in N|Solid – https://nsrc.io/DistributedTracingNS
…and more

Want to try N|Solid?

To check out the top 10 features and more in N|Solid, create your account in sign up or sign in, in the top right corner of our main page. More information is available here.

As always, we’re happy to hear your thoughts – feel free to get in touch with our team or reach out to us on Twitter at @nodesource.