The N|Solid Product Suite
Introduction
Welcome to the N|Solid documentation! N|Solid is a comprehensive product suite designed to enhance your Node.js applications with advanced observability and diagnostic capabilities. This guide will provide you with detailed information on how to effectively utilize N|Solid's components to optimize your Node.js environment.
Product Overview
N|Solid consists of two main components:
- N|Solid Runtime
- N|Solid UI
N|Solid Runtime
The N|Solid Runtime is a continuously maintained fork of the Node.js runtime. It includes additional observability features and a native thread for exporting observability and diagnostic data to various endpoints. These endpoints can include the N|Solid Console Server (preferred), an OpenTelemetry endpoint, or a StatsD endpoint.
Our engineers that work on our runtime are also contributors to the Node.js runtime as well. We keep our runtime tracking both LTS lines of Node.js and release N|Solid for at least every Node.js release, allowing you to stay up-to-date with the latest patches and changes to the upstream project.
Key Features:
- Enhanced observability features integrated into the Node.js runtime.
- Native thread for minimal overhead for collection and export of diagnostic data.
- Compatibility with multiple endpoints for data export.
- Open source: N|Solid on GitHub.
- Can be used independently with OpenTelemetry, StatsD, or its built-in JavaScript API.
- Tailored for business use-cases and complex Node.js infrastructures.
- Released in-step with Node.js, developed by contributors to Node.js.
N|Solid UI
The N|Solid UI is a powerful observability tool for managing your N|Solid Runtime instances. It provides a range of features to help you monitor and diagnose your Node.js applications. It is designed to provide a high enough level view to spot outliers with the ability to dive right into that outlier for diagnosis, in production.
Key Features:
- High-level Infrastructure View: Offers a unique comprehensive overview of your Node application deployments across your entire infrastructure.
- Process Dashboards: Provides detailed dashboards for each Node process, allowing you to access metrics and perform interactive diagnostics and profiling.
- CPU Profiling: Collect CPU profiles for performance optimization with a single click.
- Heap Profiling: Collect traditional or sampled heap snapshots and profiles with ease for unprecedented Memory Leak debugging.
- Network Tracing: Dynamically enable or disable network tracing during runtime with OpenTelemetry.
- Security Monitoring: Monitor the security of third-party libraries.
- Metrics Export: Export deep Node.js-specific metrics to N|Solid Console, OpenTelemetry, or StatsD.
N|Solid Console Server
The N|Solid Console Server serves as an endpoint for the N|Solid Runtime and hosts the N|Solid UI. For many, this is simply connecting to our SaaS platform that hosts the N|Solid Console Server for you, or we can work with enterprise customers to help them install and operate the N|Solid Console Server on-premise.
Getting Started
Getting N|Solid working does not require any code instrumentation or changes at all; you simply run the N|Solid Runtime in place of the Node.js runtime and configure the endpoint location(s) for it to communicate with. Continue to our Quickstart instructions for more details!