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We are excited to share the release of our new Cost Calculator to showcase just how much the wrong APM provider can add to your cloud hosting costs (try it now). Observability is vital, but it comes with computational overhead that shares the same infrastructure as your application. This is compounded in typical Node.js APM tooling due to the internal workings of Node.js itself. We are performance junkies at NodeSource, so observability without overhead was our first and foremost goal with the original architecture of the N|Solid Runtime. (Of course we didn’t stop there and also provide the deepest insights into your application.) With our new Cost Calculator, you can see just how much using the wrong APM tool can hurt. (WARNING: you may be shocked at the difference!).

As you can see…the difference can be shocking. At NodeSource before anything else we’re Node.js developers. We were tired of being burnt ourselves by the additional overhead costs of observability and we kept seeing it over and over for our customers as well. So we decided to build and open source a benchmarking tool (https://benchmark.nodesource.com) to raise awareness of the issue. With it you can compare throughput and other differences between common Node.js observability tooling options.

With the APM performance dashboard we can see just how much APMs impact application performance across a number of areas, and choosing incorrectly can reduce the potential throughput of your application by tens of thousands of requests per second. For more information about why this happens, check out this article by our VP of Engineering Adrián Estrada who provides a comprehensive analysis.

📗 Read the full blog post here: In-depth Analysis of the Performance Costs of APMs in Node.js.

How to use the Node Observability Cost Calculator

It's really easy to use, simply select an Observability Provider (Appdynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, Instana, or New Relic), then your cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP). From the Infrastructure Service dropdown you can select the service type and then choose from a list of options. Now enter the number of Processes you are monitoring, and see the savings!

Why APM performance matters, beyond the cost savings

Our Cost Calculator should quickly show you just how much you could save by using N|Solid over the competition without giving up observability. It’s easy to overlook the fact that your APM tooling is sharing the same processing time as your application and slowing it down. A big reason why developers and organizations love Node is for its performance, so why add overhead that slows it down? Why pay twice for observability?

(BTW - OpenTelemetry adds significant overhead too, we included it in our benchmark)

The great news is you don’t have to! Add N|solid to your stack today, and begin getting the best observability tooling (plus application security monitoring with NCM - Node Certified Modules) with the least overhead. Start here for FREE.

• 🛠️ Check the Infrastructure Cost Calculator today! - Infrastructure cost calculator - Nodesource
• Review the ✨APM Performance Dashboard✨- https://benchmark.nodesource.com
• 💚 Contribute here: https://github.com/nodesource/node-APMs-benchmark