The N|Solid Runtime

The N|Solid Runtime is our enhanced Open Source build of the current LTS versions of Node. It keeps in step with upstream Node.js releases, currently tracking the Node.js v18.x Hydrogen LTS and Node.js v20.x Iron LTS release lines. For feature releases, we generally release within a few days of the upstream Node.js release. For upstream security releases, we will release an updated version of N|Solid within 48 hours.

The intended use of the N|Solid Runtime is to use as a direct replacement of the Node.js runtime on your systems. Once in place, it will behave no differently than Node.js, but with a simple environment variable set it will export diagnostics and metrics information to a centralized N|Solid Pro UI giving you single portal with a dashboard for every single one of your Node.js processes.

The N|Solid Runtime is supplemented with a number of additional diagnostic hooks and monitors of internal runtime behavior, and an additional native diagnostics and monitoring agent that runs in its own thread to minimize performance impact to your application. This architecture is necessary to get access to the internals necessary to get at the heart of Node.js performance and resource use.

The N|Solid Agent can inspect the performance of the components of the core of Node.js: V8 and libuv. It then has multiple options for sending diagnostic and activity metrics to various endpoints. The most powerful option is the 2-way connection provided by the N|Solid Pro UI which can allow remote capture of CPU or Memory profiles and more delivered right into the UI at the press of a button. Our visiion is something like a Dev Tools that can inspect any running Node process in your infrastructure. If you have an existing OpenTelemetry or StatsD service running, it can also export traces or metrics directly. See more about Configuration.

We built the N|Solid with the Enterprise development and devops team in mind--we wanted to provide the tooling requried to solve the complex problems we encountered ourselves building large, secure, high-performing Node.js systems with many working pieces. The N|Solid Runtime is the key piece able to collect all of the information required and get it to a centralized location.

If you're interested in learning more about the Runtime, you can also check out the N|Solid Runtime Github repository.