The RED Method: Microservices Monitoring Strategy You Don’t Wanna Miss!

Do you know what is more difficult than building a product? Well, whenever any application is ready, monitoring is crucial for providing quality products and experiences for users. But, you cannot solve the problem by simply collecting many application metrics. What companies need today is actionable insights from their metrics so they can easily fix the issues of the users.  Today we will talk about the RED method.

The RED Method: The Need

The RED method is the methodology of monitoring and was coined by Tom Wilkie. It was derived from Google’s ‘Four Golden Signals’. The RED method came into existence as the previous methodologies of monitoring failed to align with the company’s objectives. The goal of the RED method is to make sure that the applications function properly for the end-users.

Understanding the RED Method

RED denotes rate, errors, and duration- the three keys that you will monitor for each service.

Rate- Number of requests the service is handling per second

Error- Number of failed requests per second

Duration- Amount of time each request takes

These metrics can give you a good understanding of how your services are performing. The number of requests gives you an idea of how much traffic is coming to your service. Errors let you know if a service is functioning within your SLO. The duration gives you insight into the overall user experience.

Advantages of the RED method

The RED method serves many benefits in the monitoring process. The first benefit is that it helps in reducing the cognitive load so that the engineers can determine why a service is encountering issues. This means problems can be solved faster and also easier to scale the operations team.

This makes it way easier to understand what is going wrong and also provides tips to fix it. Even if they don’t have any understanding of the service they are trying to fix. The engineers can look at the data and determine the best ways to improve the user experience. And also, the same metrics are used for every service thus reducing the time of training.

Additionally, the RED method is more closely aligned with the user’s and the company’s overall objectives. Users will be pissed off if they see errors when they start using your app and they will be really disturbed if your web pages take time to load. 

Another advantage of using this method is that it automates tasks and alerts across your service. Automating repetitive tasks is simpler as all services are treated the same. You can also standardize things like dashboards layouts.

Limitations of the RED method

We have discussed many benefits of the RED method above but that doesn’t mean that it is perfect and without any flaws. It comes with its fair share of limitations. Firstly, it is designed for request-driven applications, so for any use cases that require batch processing or streaming, the RED method may not be the perfect solution.

Another downside is that the “external” view means that you will face a lot of difficulties in knowing how close service is to fail. Even the slightest increase in the traffic may increase the response duration and you may also not have application metrics to determine the reason. In the RED method, your metrics may be interpreted differently and hence it requires deliberate implementation.

And all these drawbacks are okay as the RED method was never intended to cover each and every aspect of the monitoring process. 

Ksolves Guidance

Well, do you know what makes Ksolves different from other software development companies? It is the zeal and zest to offer innovative solutions to our clients. And this is what makes us one of the top Microservices development companies around the globe. So if you are looking to get some insights on the RED method or microservice architecture, our highly trained microservices experts can help you. Our personalized customer service and round-the-clock assistance can help you save a lot of time. And yes, our quick problem-solving skills are the cherry on the cake.

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