What is Node.js?

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment built on Chrome's V8 javascript engine. It is used to build fast, scalable server-side web applications. The event-driven, non-blocking I/O model makes Node.js lightweight and efficient. Node.js employs a Single Threaded Event Loop design to manage several concurrent clients. The Node.js employs two basic fundamentals namely - asynchronous model and Mon Blocking of I/O operations.

Figure 1 : Architecture of Node.js

Following are the components of Node.js architecture:

  • Requests: There are two kinds of requests, incoming and outgoing. Node.js maintains the minimum thread pool to serve the requests. The requests to the server can either be blocking or non-blocking.

  • Node.js Server: The Node.js server is responsible for accepting the user requests, processing them, and returning the results to the users.

  • Event Queue: The Node.js server retrieves the incoming requests and sends them to the event Queue in a sequence.

  • Thread Pool: The library maintains a pool of threads that are used by node.js for performing operations required to process requests.

  • Event Loop: Event Loop, the core component of the architecture, receives requests from the Event Queue, picks it up, checks whether it requires a blocking input/output (I/O) operation, and sends out the responses to the clients.

  • External Resources: To handle the blocking client requests, auxiliary threads called worker threads are used when the limited internal threads are not available.

Why Monitor Node.js?

Along with Java and Microsoft .NET, Node.js is one of the most popular platforms for developing and supporting applications. As businesses and organizations have moved to deliver services online, user experience has become the key performance indicator of web performance. At the same time, when performance issues occur, IT operations must collaborate with development teams to determine "Why is the application slow?".

As organizations leverage increasingly sophisticated infrastructures to deliver Node.js applications, the ability of the monitoring platform to provide correlated insights from code-level, the V8 JavaScript engine and up into infrastructures such as Kubernetes, Clouds such as Azure and Web Servers becomes key to delivering essential web services successfully. eG Enterprise offers Node.js monitoring model that helps administrators obtain indepth insights into the performance of the Node.js Engine and Node.js applications.