Flask Monitoring and APM Benefits

Many renowned businesses use the well-known web framework Flask. Flask is quite famous among developers for making small and full-fledged applications. It is known for being a straightforward framework to learn hence why it is popular among established organizations. 

Monitoring your Flask application can be a challenge. Many important operations are happening inside of them, and if anything goes wrong, it can cause some damage. Luckily, there are many companies that provide Flask monitoring services, and they each have their own benefits. We'll go through the advantages of utilizing Flask in this blog post, as well as how to use APM to monitor a flask application.

You can navigate the blog with the following links!

Key Benefits of Flask Monitoring

Performance details on every web endpoint and background job

Detailed transaction traces with backtraces

Enhanced database query monitoring

Detects repeatedly expensive database queries

Alerting

Deploy Tracking

Intelligent performance digest email

Embed charts

Integrates with GitHub, Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, Zapier, and more.

Conclusion

What is a Python flask?

Python flask is a framework for developing sophisticated, scalable web frameworks. Python flask is mainly used to make REST APIs in Python, which can be consumed in the front end. Flask enables developers to divide the application into smaller modules which makes code easy to read and manage efficiently. Flask does not support many features directly like Django, but it provides extensions for adding features that are also made in the flask.

Historically speaking, Flask was invented by Arman Ronacher, who was also a member of Pocoo. Pocoo is a vast community of python developers that was formed in 2004. This joke—which was originally intended as an April Fool's joke—became a real concern and inspired the development of Werkzeug and Jinja. With time Flask became very popular among Python developers for web application development, mainly for features like web scraping. After Django, it is the second most popular Python framework among developers.

ScoutAPM makes it incredibly easy for you to keep an eye on your Flask application. You can read more about how to monitor your Flask application in this blog.

Key Benefits of Flask Monitoring

Sooner or later, monitoring of your application will be required if it uses any flask applications. We will talk about the advantages of monitoring a Flask application in this section. However, you may read this blog as well if you're interested in learning more about the tools ScoutAPM offers for Flask monitoring. Let's go over each advantage of flask monitoring in turn:

Performance details on every web endpoint and background job

Whenever we build API endpoints using Flask or any framework, monitoring those APIs is very necessary if we want to enhance the performance of the application. Flask monitoring lets you monitor the response time, latency, and success ratio of a web endpoint. It also helps in seeing the full trace of the API. In the traces, you can see the services through which data is passed and how much time it took for each of the services. Additionally, you may add logs to publish the results of various functions, so you can see exactly where the issue originated.

Detailed transaction traces with backtraces

Transaction in databases refers to some operation in a database. If you have written your backend code with flask, then you will always want to track the transaction of backtraces of the function. For example, you want to trigger some event after the change of a particular object in the database. In that case, if you want to see whether the trigger is happening at the right condition or not, then you want to see the traces of whether correct data was passed to the function and if there is any failure where it occurred. In this case, your Flask monitoring application can make your task very easy, and you can identify issues just with some clicks.

Enhanced database query monitoring

Since the database is a crucial component of the system, it must be thoroughly optimized in order for the application to operate as intended. The Flask monitoring application allows you to keep an eye on both your database and the database queries that are running in the code. The results of database searches can be compared, and you can choose those that are preferable. You can decide how to write queries that are more efficient and effective by looking at how quickly a database query responds to it. Using the Flask monitoring application, you can also manage different database queries by making a collection and comparing the different queries in a collection to find efficient DB queries.

Detects repeatedly expensive database queries

Expensive database queries are those which have so many joins used and are very costly to run. Most of the database costs more for the joins and similar queries as it involves querying from two or more tables. If your Flask application contains such queries, the monitoring tool for Flask enables you to keep track of them and determine which queries are more expensive for your business. In order to cut costs, you can also base your judgments on the queries you can omit. To lower the cost of joins, you can also choose to restructure the database table.

Alerting

Alerting is one of the important features of any application monitoring application. Whenever an issue or bug happens with your Flask application, then the corresponding teams should be alerted of the issue instantly. Quick alert updates help teams take action quickly. ScoutAPM provides such integration for sending alerts to the developers. It also has various third-party integration, which helps in sending notifications through multiple channels. You can check more about third-party integration for notification on the official website.

Deploy Tracking

Deployment tracking is keeping a track of all deployments to different environments in the application. The Flask application needs to pass through various kinds of tests before deployment, which is called a pipeline. The monitoring application helps you track the pipeline status of your application. It also sends alerts to the stakeholder regarding pipeline status, whether it was successful or failed. It makes deployment much faster as it cuts the human intervention for deploying the code in different environments.

Intelligent performance digest email

Digest email about the performance of your product not only helps you make weekly reports quickly but also helps in analyzing the trend of the software. Digest email can be weekly or biweekly both depending on the software. They help in predicting the behavior of software in the future. For example, let's say that the digest says that there are more customers visiting on Saturday and Sunday in comparison to other weekdays. Using this data, you can say that weekends offer better results, and you can run your ads accordingly. Using digest email can also improve the stability of your software.

Embed charts

Seeing information only in the form of text and tables can be boring sometimes. Hence many Flask monitoring applications provide us information in the form of different types of charts like bar charts, line charts, histograms, pie charts, etc. Charts are more readable and easy to analyze in comparison to tables and text. You can easily see a chart and tell what kind of pattern it is making for that data. Charts are basically introduced to make the user interface better. The monitoring application also gives the option for exporting charts so they can be exported in reports.

Integrates with GitHub, Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, Zapier, and more.

In any Flask monitoring application, third-party integration is one of the most important things.  Using third-party integrations, we can use those features which are not in the monitoring application. Scout APM Flask monitoring provides many third-party integrations such as Github, Slack, Pagerduty, Splunk, OpsGenie, Sentry, etc. All integrations have their own benefits, such as Sentry for error monitoring, Github for accessing code directly, Slack and Zapier for alerting, etc. You can find a full list of third-party integrations and their category on the official website of Scout. Other than that, Scout also provides an API for exporting data and some other dashboards from your Scout application. You can find full documentation for the API here.

Other than that, there are many benefits of using Flask monitoring. Scout APM provides most of the benefits which will not only enhance your productivity but also make your software better. There are many reasons for choosing Scout; you can read about them in detail on the why scout page.

Conclusion

Flask is a famous framework for making web applications fast. We discuss how it went viral from an April fools joke to one of the world’s famous Python frameworks. It is used by infamous companies nowadays for making web applications. Hence, Flask monitoring has become an indispensable need for an organization. Flask monitoring has numerous advantages, including deployment tracking, alerting, tracing, performance books, and more. Furthermore, you will receive a monitoring dashboard with all of the metrics in one location.

Scout APM includes Flask monitoring as one of its core features, so you will enjoy all the advantages we have already covered. Additionally, Scout offers support that enables you to swiftly resolve issues with Flask monitoring. The Scout APM price is lower than that of other similar tools on the market, which is the most decisive factor.  Another advantage of using Scout is that you may test out the demo for free for a period of 14 days without disclosing any financial information. Sign up on Scout and start making your Flask application more powerful.

Happy monitoring!