Distributed applications can get very complex. Lots of services, resources, and stages that are dynamically change over time. Epsagon helps you to encapsulate all under a single entity - application.

What is an application

In Epsagon, an application is a group of services and resources. For example:

The following retail-store-prod application aggregates together our Spring, Kafka, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, and Stripe all together.

Grouping into applications can help your afterward to easily filter, visualize, and define an alert behavior based on the application.

Configuring the application name

Configuring the application name can be done from the tracing library. For example in Node.js it would look like the following (or through the environment variable):

const epsagon = require('epsagon');
epsagon.init({
  token: 'epsagon-token',
  appName: 'app-name-stage',  // <----- setting the application name
  metadataOnly: false,
});

Once set, every call and operation that is being captured throughout this service, will belong to the same application, for example:



[block:image]
{
  "images": [
    {
      "image": [
        "https://files.readme.io/bb065e2-application-example.png",
        "application-example.png",
        612,
        382,
        "#ececeb"
      ]
    }
  ]
}
[/block]

In this scenario, we've enable Epsagon tracing on the consumer service, and all interacted resources will belong to `app-name-stage`.


[block:api-header]
{
  "title": "Choosing an application name"
}
[/block]

The simplest way of choosing an application would be `{business-name}-{stage}`.

In business name, you can insert the part of the application belongs to, for example - mobile-app, store, or data-pipeline. The stage can be any meaningful separation for you, in case you are having the same application, but in different stages or environments.

Good examples would be:
* `mobile-app-dev`
* `store-prod`
* `data-pipeline-staging`