The Pitfalls of Waiting too Long for a Couchbase Health Check (and How You Can Keep Your System Protected)

You take your car in for an oil change every 5,000 miles or six months to keep it running smoothly.

You visit your hairstylist every six to eight weeks to keep your hair looking its best.

You see the optometrist once per year to check your vision.

You visit your doctor once per year for an annual physical.

All of this means you keep things in working order. But is your Couchbase system as up to date as the oil levels in your car?

Just like your car or your eyeglass prescription, your enterprise system can benefit from regular checkups to ensure that everything is running well. You can’t afford for things to go wrong enterprise wide. So how can you prevent disaster from striking in your system?

At Cantle Tech, we proudly offer our own checkup system, and it’s called Health Check. Like some other Couchbase partners, we run a deep check of your Couchbase programming. Where we differ is that we do a much more complete examination of your entire system.

We’re firm believers in the power of regular full-system Health Checks. Why? We’ve seen crisis averted time and time again thanks to the comprehensive investigative powers of Health Check.

What Does Cantle Tech’s Health Check Look Like?

Running a system in a distributed environment can sometimes prove to be a challenge. You may come across latencies or lagging responses, connections sometimes drop out entirely, and the question becomes, “Is this a network glitch? Is there a remote cluster down?”

Couchbase was designed to function well but, over time, it can be necessary to check in on your system and make adjustments. Thus Couchbase Health Check was formed. This is a service that is provided by Couchbase or a participating partner to check the health of your Couchbase system and look for instabilities and other communication issues.

At Cantle Tech, we dive a little deeper. Why? We don’t like to limit our Health Check program solely to Couchbase. After all, most of the time, the issue isn’t with the Couchbase product itself but in the implementation of APIs and other added systems. Sometimes it’s even the data model the user experience is trying to force. Our services are a much more complete check of how your entire enterprise system is running.

Health Check can give useful diagnostics on the state of your Couchbase solutions as well as the surrounding systems and pinpoint the likely cause of a lag or other connection issue. Sometimes just knowing the cause can give you a good jumpstart on writing a workaround, saving you wasted hours spent writing an ineffective solution that doesn’t address the problem.

It’s like an annual physical or a biannual visit to the dentist for a cleaning; you get an overall view of the health of your system so you know what improvements to make.

Speed Up Your Queries

Couchbase is built to be extensible—it’s scalable by its very nature. It’s also designed to provide you with data in real time. However, if developers are constantly working with your system or even occasionally pulling data, your indexes may not be updated. This can slow down your queries, which can result in a poor user experience.

Cantle Tech can run a Health Check of your entire enterprise system—Couchbase included—to identify places where indexes can be updated and data can be cached so that you can retrieve the information you and your clients need in record time.

Distribute Your Data

Your system develops and changes over time. It builds up layer by layer—this is referred to as your “tech stack.” Your tech stack is a combination of components that are used to create a web or mobile application. Each layer of the application builds on the previous layer, creating a stack. It’s like web programming building blocks.

As this evolves, your Couchbase system works to keep your tech stack balanced. Why? An imbalanced stack could lead to side effects that your data store needs to account for, slowing things down and causing issues.

What could happen with a poorly distributed stack? Your tech stack begins with your data sources and runs through several layers to the endpoint: the user experience. If one of these layers crumbles, the line of communication falters. This is why developers always check before adding to a stack; they always do their due diligence to ensure that each layer plays nicely with the others and that it fits well into the Couchbase solution. However, it still can be unbalanced, leaving your system vulnerable.

A Couchbase Health Check will make sure your system doesn’t topple over as a result of a top-heavy or imbalanced tech stack. It will highlight the areas that can be redistributed so that your system doesn’t fold like a house of cards as time passes.

Create a Better Partnership Between Couchbase and Other Applications

Sometimes the latencies you are experiencing with your solution don’t have anything to do with how your data is stored. In many cases, our team at Cantle Tech has discovered that the true lag isn’t from the data store or your Couchbase program at all but from other APIs or the data model the user interface is trying to force.

We see time and time again that the application that’s been built atop Couchbase is at fault; how the users are accessing the data is causing the latencies. The programs just aren’t communicating because of how the application manipulates the data to prepare it for the user interface.

When you run a Health Check with Cantle Tech, you can find these places where data is getting lost in translation and streamline the flow of communication between your Couchbase data store and the user interface. It’s a more complete Health Check than you find with other Couchbase partners because we check the entire system as a whole, not just Couchbase. Your programs will run faster, and data will flow quickly.

Mitigate Risk and Prevent System Failures

With an unstable tech stack or a shaky application put atop your Couchbase system, anything that increases your service load is a big risk. This could look like a Black Friday sale or a blog post that goes viral and experiences a huge spike in traffic. When these load increases happen, you need to implement solutions quickly to match the load demands.

However, with a foundation that has slowly become shaky over time, you won’t be able to add solutions to handle these unexpected load increases. When this happens, your users will experience slow load times and errors when they visit your website.

Slow loading times can be the death of conversions on your website. Forty percent of consumers will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Even a one-second delay in page loading can result in a 7-percent decrease in conversions. You have to do everything you can to prevent them.

A Health Check can help you keep your enterprise clean. We can take a regular pulse of the stability and health of your system. With our Health Check, we can identify any shaky architecture anywhere in your tech stack so you can mitigate the risk during the next phase of development or even prevent a failure. Other companies might only check the health of your Couchbase program, but we examine your entire system for risks.

An added benefit? You’ll see your load times speed up too.

Think about it: It would be pretty frustrating to spend a huge portion of your IT budget on a huge enhancement only to find out that it has to be redone because it won’t ever be able to satisfy user needs. These load shifts can happen seasonally, as in the case of Black Friday, which means that regularly scheduled Health Checks can help keep the system from failing as things shift throughout the year.

Find SaaS Applications That Work the Way They Should

At Cantle Tech, we see cases all the time where businesses have hired offshore developers to build a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. These applications need enhancements to be usable, but because the groundwork was never solidified, the app still will never be what the app’s owner or their customers are hoping for.

With Couchbase, you can start with a more solid foundation, and you have access to Health Checks as you grow your tech stack and develop your application. You can ensure it’s stable and shine a light on any issues when they arise anywhere in your programming.

When potential clients come to us with issues in the applications created by offshore developers, frequently there’s not much we can do. The foundation is too unstable to add anything on, and the only real solution is to start over to deliver a usable, marketable SaaS app.

But when a client gives us the go-ahead to start from scratch? We are able to build an enterprise that is sellable, that requires less support and has a much lower total cost of ownership—and comes with a pre-packaged system check to boot. We provide a system that’s built here in the U.S. with all the bells and whistles it needs at a highly competitive price.

What we have seen over and over is that regularly scheduled Health Checks keep disasters at bay. At Cantle Tech, we firmly believe that an ounce of prevention is worth far more than a pound of cure.

You can’t plan for disasters to strike, and there isn’t time to stop and make repairs that waste precious time while your system sits idle. Why not find the simple fixes that will solve the problems months ahead of time instead? Regularly scheduled Health Checks of the entire system—not just your Couchbase solutions—help you identify these smaller fixes enterprise wide before larger issues arise.

When you subscribe to our Health Check service, you don’t have to worry about remembering to set up a Health Check, and you don’t have to process the information on your own. With Cantle Tech, you also get a deeper look into the total health of your entire system. We remember to conduct a Health Check for you, and we give you expert advice on how to keep your system in proper working order based on what’s uncovered in the report.

Subscribe to Cantle Tech’s Health Check service, and leave the rest to us.

Want to learn more about keeping your system healthy? We want to be your system’s physician. Contact us today!