Support application performance management (APM)

[pbolduc]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When running COMS in OpenShift, there is no easy way to monitor the heath of a COMS deployment.

• readiness / health check end point
• metrics that are exposed as Prometheus metrics that can be scraped by sysdig or similar metrics system,
• logs should be configurable to be sent to other locations like Splunk
• logs should be less verbose, every single request that completes is logged out, this produces too much noise and data.
• a lot of the verbose log data could be exposed as metrics (histogram for operation elapsed time, with tags for operation name, http status code, http verb).

See

• nodejs reference architecture metrics
• nodejs reference architecture health checks
• nodejs reference architecture logging

[TimCsaky]

Update: The hosted COMS service uses a GitHub actions based pipeline with OpenShift deployment templates (managed by Helm). These are included in the COMS repo. (see .github and charts directories) The app containers do have configured liveness/readiness checks by calling the root path. We use the bc gov sysdig service to log/alert on those failing. I documented our Sysdig set-up for our hosted API's. But perhaps we do need a dedicated 'health' endpoint. I will raise that with the devs.

We're using the Express/Winston logging middleware that allows for different logging output levels. When we get time we would like to include a fluent-bit container that sends application, access, error logs etc to different outputs. For now we only monitor http errors using Sysdig.