App failure points–places in an application’s infrastructure, network, or API where errors typically occur–can be the downfall of good code. Whether your team is plagued by common failure points or you’re working out complicated bugs, these points can be frustrating, time-consuming, and even expensive if extensive downtime is incurred.
Here are five ways to identify and eliminate these failure points to keep the company’s system up and running.
1. Pinpoint Common Failure Points
Failure points are a fairly common problem in web and API development. While this may seem like bad news, the amount of research already invested in the issue may prove helpful. By creating a list of common failure points that your team may encounter, you can help them narrow down the possibilities when they’re searching for a problem in the future.
Common failure points include:
DNS servers
Database servers
File servers
Third-party APIs
Other third-party services
2. Consider (or Reconsider) the Infrastructure
When working with a physical network, a system may have a range of different failure points than one based in the cloud due to hardware concerns or limitations. Though cloud-based infrastructures do not have the same hardware concerns, that doesn’t mean they’re not without their own vulnerabilities and failure points.
A major benefit of cloud infrastructures is that they can scale up to handle more demanding workloads. However, it’s important to keep in mind that just because a cloud infrastructure has the ability to scale, that doesn’t mean an application running in the cloud will also scale as it should. A pre-existing weak point in the application’s code may not be immediately apparent under normal conditions, but after scaling up to meet the demands of a larger user base, could cause a full-blown performance failure. An application must be designed to properly utilize the cloud infrastructure, and this means improving any weak areas that may result in network bottlenecks and preventing proper scalability.
A load testing program will help pinpoint areas of concern in both a network and an application’s infrastructure. By scaling and testing the application with a solid load-testing tool, your team will be able to identify if the source of the problem is in the application code, the network infrastructure, or elsewhere.
3. Create a Streamlined Process for Addressing Concerns
Of course, to truly streamline the ticketing cycle, your company should have a process in place for identifying and eliminating failure points. Once this process is created, it can be applied to each problem area that arises, which will help minimize downtime.
Testers can incorporate software to aid with detection or create a series of steps that your team can follow to narrow down the possible locations of the failure.
4. Detect Failures with the Right Testing to Minimize Downtime Events
As developers are establishing a detection process, it would be wise to look into testing software to better determine the exact point of a failure and how to remedy the issue moving forward. This will allow the team to avoid wasting effort on time-consuming bug hunts by pinpointing the exact location of the problem. This quick detection can streamline troubleshooting and prevent costly downtime.
The right testing software will come with a wide range of reporting features, so your team can better learn which areas of the infrastructure commonly cause these errors.
5. Proactively Avoid Failure with Testing and Monitoring
The right performance load testing and monitoring software can run through the entire system and locate weak points so you’re aware of them before there’s a problem. These intuitive monitoring and testing services can preemptively check every aspect of the site or API and detect vulnerabilities that may turn into failures in certain scenarios. By taking advantage of this software, programmers can even correct failure points before the code is deployed, saving time and money down the road.
By properly identifying and eliminating failure points – and by investing in testing and monitoring services like those provided by Apica – developers, programmers, and project managers can maintain high uptime through even the most heavily trafficked situations.
