Announcing Worker Threads Monitoring for Node.js in N|Solid

NodeSource Press

Announcing Worker Threads Monitoring for Node.js in N|Solid

Seattle – Mar. 12, 2021 – NodeSource is very excited to announce the addition of Worker Threads support in N|Solid, an amazing new feature for our customers on their journey with Node.js.

Worker Threads are a very powerful feature in Node.js that allows developers to build more complex and robust applications. Worker Threads became stable in Node.js v12 in April 2019 the Node.js Contributors have been heavily focusing on this killer feature because they provide developers the ability to improve the performance CPU intensive-work. To learn more about the importance and the basics of worker threads, check out this article.

Organizations have had a major challenge in adopting Worker Threads (in spite of their value) due to the lack of tooling and visibility on what’s happening inside the threads. Today, with the latest release of N|Solid, that all changes.

“Over the last year our customers have been looking to adopt Worker Threads but needed a way to have the visibility they need within them, said NodesSource CEO Russ Whitman, “Our team dove into the challenge and identified an incredible solution, we are proud to bring this new capability to market before any other APM”.

With Worker Threads in N|Solid, customers will now be able to have in-depth metrics of each worker thread just as they have leveraged them previously on the main thread.

By adding full support for Worker threads developers should be able to use Workers in a production environment with the confidence that any issues that arise can be solved just as easily as if the process was not using Workers.

What’s so exciting about this?

For the first time in the Node.js ecosystem, you can now take Heap Snapshots and CPU profile of an individual Worker Thread of your preference, (not only the main thread) compare threads, debug, troubleshoot and find solutions for any problems while using threads in production. You can now develop using Worker Threads without any worrying and the confidence provided by all N|Solid metrics. These insights will help developers build better applications and also solve issues that arise significantly faster.

We now offer worker threads support out of the box. It’s seamless, integrated, with zero overhead, backwards compatible and includes CLI support. No other commercial APM supports this.

To take a heap snapshot or CPU profile you just have to choose the thread 🙌😁, it's that simple.

Why should you try it?

There are no other solutions on the market that enable developers to easily and seamlessly stream metrics or take snapshots and CPU profiles of individual Worker threads. N|Solid is the only product that exists for this. No other APM offers this capability.

So if you want to take the maximum advantage of Worker Threads on the enterprise, and easily find more information about the threads you are creating and using, you should give N|Solid it a try.

How is this different from current solutions?

It can be difficult to gather information about a Worker Thread in production. Usually to get that information, you need to do it in development, interrupt the thread and enter into debugging mode. Normally you can’t do this in production.

With this release, a Worker Thread running in production can be instantly interrupted and you can gather information about it in the form of a CPU profile or a heap snapshot while the process is running, that is, without interrupting the process itself and regardless of the state of the worker thread (other solutions out there require the worker to be available to be queried).

You can collect and report all the same metrics for all threads and they can be stored, so you can have a comprehensive overview of how all of your worker threads have been doing over time, including when they have been up, or down, how many are you are currently using, what they are doing, how many handles they have, and others.

To find out more about this new release, check out this blog post

About NodeSource, Inc.

NodeSource, LLC is a technology company completely focused on Node.js and is dedicated to helping organizations and developers leverage the power of this technology. We offer the leading APM for monitoring and securing Node.js and provide world-class support and consulting services to help organizations navigate their Node.js journey. #KnowYourNode. For more information, visit NodeSource.com and follow @NodeSource on Twitter.