Design and Monitoring Performance of Digital Properties

International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET) e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 09 Issue: 07 | July 2022 www.irjet.net p-ISSN: 2395-0072
© 2022, IRJET | Impact Factor value: 7.529 | ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal | Page 2649
Design and Monitoring Performance of Digital Properties
Ankit Kumar Singh1, B. M. Sagar2
1,2Department of Information Science and Engineering, R. V. College of Engineering, Karnataka, Bangalore, India.
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Abstract - Digital Property is a very wide term which
considers all forms of electronic information ranging from a
simple file stored inside a personal computer, images stored
in hosted cloud storage systems, codebases stored on
GitHub, etc. Businesses need digital properties for
innumerable reasons, most important ones being – to
maintain a strong social media presence, to provide insights
on what it does and finally, to create valuable assets for
themselves and boost their bottom-line. Ranging from API’s
to fully fledged web-based applications, all come under the
category of Digital Properties. Naturally, due to many
reasons, these digital properties may not work as intended
by the owner and hence, monitoring the performance of
these becomes an equally valuable task. This paper defines
what a complete end to end digital property solution looks
like using Django and tries to deliver the importance of such
systems in modern day businesses. In this paper, by digital
properties, the focus will be on two major properties – APIs
and Web Applications.
Key Words: Digital Properties, Software Development
Life Cycle, DevOps, Agile, Virtualization, API, Web
Applications, Application Performance Monitoring.
1. INTRODUCTION
A strong presence on internet has rather become
necessary for all kinds of businesses and organizations.
Not only at the top of the hierarchy, but even for individual
teams and divisions, digital properties help in providing
new and exciting ways to solve problems. These solutions
in turn help the organization to boost their performance
from grass root levels.
Although digital properties are necessary for the
organizations, their design is a much-complicated task.
There are large number of factors that are taken into
consideration while designing such applications. Starting
from the concurrency of the applications to support
multiple users at the same time, to providing utmost sense
of the security to the user, everything turns out to be a
daunting task. Now a days, a wide variety of technical
stacks are available which perform the job well. Large
frameworks are being built to provide ease of
development to the developers and at the same time
reduce the time to deliver the applications. Apart from
being extremely easy to use and with appropriate
document and support, these frameworks are Open
Source, i.e., one can view the whole codebase and can
inspect, modify, and enhance it as per their needs.
After designing and creating the appropriate software, the
question of its feasibility arises. If a certain software isn’t
feasible, rather than adding value to the organization, it
will decrease their productivity and performance. Hence,
monitoring the performance of the developed tools and
softwares becomes an equally important task.
This paper focuses on design and creation of a web-based
application using Django as the software stack and using
the concept of Application Performance Monitoring to
monitor the performance of the latter, along with all the
APIs integrated within, hence providing a complete end to
end solution with the help of concepts of Software
Development Life Cycle and thereby following the
appropriate steps.
2. RELATED WORK
Web development is not something which the world is
unknown too. There exists numerous research, books, and
data on web about web itself. They help in throughout
development of projects and have the programmers and
researchers to know about new advancements and
mistakes of the past. Django is one such stack which has
become popular in recent past for developing web
applications in quick time. Django is credited with
reshaping the web development through Python. "This
actually takes input from the user converts it into some
valid query and then fires it onto the database. It also takes
input from the database after the query is fired and renders
the result onto the screen." [1]
Most of the surveys done for this paper revolve around
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) – How they
work? How can one monitor their performance? What are
the criteria for measuring their performance? How to
connect an API with an existing frontend? and so on.
In [2], everything starting from what an API is to how to
monitor their performance – has been explained in brief. It
also lists the various types of API’s – SOAP, REST and JSON
as well as explains the importance of monitoring API’s and
how one can achieve that. Finally, it gives insights on how
Splunk’s Observability Tool can be used for application
performance monitoring.

[3] gives insights on how modern Application Performance
Monitoring Tools (APMs) work. Being one of the best APM
provider itself, DataDog documentation does its best to
explain the modern agent-based tools wherein an agent is a
software program that collects event metrics from the host
that it is integrated in and sends the data to the monitoring
tool which is then used to analyze and represent that data
in much aesthetic ways. Such APMs can be integrated with
most of the modern-day frameworks like NodeJS, Django,
Java, etc.
Even Browser JavaScript has an in-built library for
monitoring performance of web-based applications,
Performance-API. [4] explains how this library can be used
to analyze some of the metrics used in evaluating the
performance of web applications. It also lists advantages of
using Performance API and other related libraries which
can be used in complement to latter. It mainly lists
properties like High Resolution Time, Resource Timing,
Paint Timing, etc. which can be used to monitor
performance of a webpage. [5] is the official MDN
documentation for the Performance API, listing all the
classes and functions it comprises and brief details for the
same.
On digging deeper, another APM, [6] gives not only
observability, but also provides traces – the collected
telemetry data. It provides a seamless flow between
metrics and traces. If anything, suspicious is found in a web
app transaction, one can click that transaction and view
what’s going behind the scenes and find a fix for the issue.
It also provides application of advanced filters to trace
data. Finally, it supports various intuitive representations
like Gantt Charts to visualize the collected data efficiently.
3. METHODOLOGY
The methodology adopted to carry out the paper can be
divided into 5 major steps. These are explained below.
3.1 Using Django Architecture for developing the
application
The digital properties in highlight, i.e., the web apps and
the API’s, make use of Django as a framework for both
frontend and backend. Django is a high-level Python web
framework that allows development in quick time and is
now popularly used to develop secure and maintainable
websites.
Django simplifies the work for software developers and
allows a softer learning curve as compared to other
frameworks. Django mainly uses the following two
concepts:
 Rapid Development: Developers can do more than
one iteration at a time without starting the whole
schedule from scratch
 Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) concept: Developers
can reuse existing code and focus on the unique
one.
Django offers great compatibility with PostgresQL [7] and
provides ease of development. The fact that Python is a
comparatively slow language is compensated by the quick
development time it offers due to availability of vast
number of libraries. The Model-View-Template
Architecture of Django also allows users to handle the
databases much more efficiently.
Another reason for using Django is the security it provides.
It provides protection against most common types of
attacks in the form of middlewares [8]. And most
importantly, Django is good for Search Engine
Optimization which is very important for big businesses
and organizations.
3.2 Utilizing crons to perform backend jobs
Crons are readily available on Linux based distributions
for scheduling tasks that can be executed in future. These
execute the assigned job periodically, for e.g., Execution of
garbage collection script daily at midnight or to perform
automatic backup every week and so on.
For most of the crons, there are three components, these
are:
 Script to be executed,
 Command that executed the abovementioned
script, and
 The action or output of the script.
Cron jobs in this project will be used to make changes in
the database (perform CRUD operations) and to retrieve
data from external API’s. This section of the paper will be
referred to as ‘backend scripts’ for the rest of the paper.
Fig 1. Proposed architecture for the web application.

3.3 Usage of external libraries to develop the frontend
HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the main constituent of the
frontend part of the web application. Django also provides
support via Django Template language.
Apart from that, several 3rd-party packages have also been
used. These packages offer a wide range of features that
are required for the application. DataTables is one such
framework. It is used to display large amounts of data
quickly in tabular format, at the same time offering
functionalities like:
 Pagination
 Responsive
 Customized Search
The most important part, DataTables being open-source
library. Another framework, SemanticUI, which is very
similar to Bootstrap, has also been used. It offers human-
friendly HTML which is used to build responsive and clean
layouts. Classes are pre-defined, and the code is minimal
which further helps in debugging.
Fig 2. Frontend Tech-Stack
Another library that is being use is Popperjs which is yet
another famous library for integrating tooltips in a web
application. It provides inbuilt support for positioning
tooltips and other effects which prevent overflow and
clipping of the data.
3.4 Integrating an elastic agent in the application
After the application is up and running, hosted on a Linux
based cloud hosted environment, monitoring performance
of the application begins.
To achieve the objective, another software stack has been
used, the Elasticsearch-Logstash-Kibana (ELK) stack. In
recent past, the ELK stack has become very popular in the
field of monitoring and observability tools development.
Also, the code is open source, so users can experiment
with it and develop applications as per their own
convenience.
To use Elastic APM, an agent is installed inside the web
application which takes note of all the processes
happening inside it. This agent is then connected to the
Kibana dashboards where it passes the data collected for
Kibana to make sense of it. Logstash is used to get the
application logs and send them to Kibana so that the user
can get helpful visualizations out of those logs. Kibana is
basically a dashboarding tool provided by team Elastic. It
receives data in the form of indexes and provides different
meaningful visualizations for the user to make sense of it.
Fig 3. Elastic APM - Workflow
As a part of Elastic APM, one can also visualize system
metrics, system health, etc. using different agents
(referred to as Beats by Elastic). Elastic APM supports a
wide variety of backend systems via which, one can design
their web application.
Elastic supports a wide variety of integrations in the form
of agents which cover almost all the systems. From
monitoring the health of the host itself to monitoring the
performance of the application, Elastic provides support
for each aspect of monitoring that one might think of.
3.5 Monitoring the performance on Kibana
After setting up Kibana and connecting it with the
elasticsearch agent, performance of the web application is
monitored. Whenever a user opens the web application,
the processes which take place are displayed as
transactions on the Kibana dashboard. In depth details of a
transactions are provided by Kibana.
Kibana also provides graphical representation of various
metrics like latency, availability, success/error
transactions, etc. to monitor the application. Using all
these metrics, performance of a web application can be
evaluated with much ease. The filtering and comparison
capabilities provided by Kibana are also very much
customizable as per user’s needs.

Custom dashboards can also be created in Kibana using
various available fields and creating visualization [9] upon
them thereon. These visualizations can be built on top of
the pre-defined ones, and hence provide information
which is specific to user’s needs.
4. ADVANTAGES
This paper provides insights on how one can create digital
properties in the form of web applications and API’s and
provide complete observability and monitoring solutions
for the same. This results in the creation of an end-to-end
solution without needing any other input from and 3rd
party as such.
Some of the most important advantages behind
development of such applications are:
 Creation of Digital property allows the developer to
experience various aspects of Software
Development Life Cycle.
 These applications provide Businesses and
Organizations with complete solutions which
further boost their productivity.
 Exposure to various available technologies to
design and create software systems.
 Provide monitoring and observability to the user,
hence a complete solution.
 Based on the performance, one can evaluate where
the performance of the digital property is lagging
and take appropriate steps.
In this era of modern advances, users interact with digital
properties for various content and services. Ensuring a
high level of user experience and delivering seamless
performance independent of user’s geographical proximity
has become the need of the hour. This is where
performance monitoring plays its part. [10] is another such
application which evaluates the performance of web
applications and presents a set of metrics which can
further help companies fine-tune their services and deliver
services efficiently.
5. CONCLUSION
A fully fledged web-based application along with the
complete flow of its development cycle has been explained
in this paper. It provides insights on how Businesses and
Organizations can use the Agile approach of Software
Development Life Cycle to develop end to end complete
solutions and enhance their efficiency.
The paper also provides exposure to Observability tools
and the importance of Observability in modern software
infrastructure, and the way observability is helping
improve and optimize the efficiency of web-based
applications.
REFERENCES
[1] Adrian Holovaty and Jacob K. Moss, "The Definitive
Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right", pp. 17.
[2] API’s in Action, [online]
Available:
https://www.splunk.com/en_us/pdfs/resources/e-
book/apis-in-action.pdf
[3] Network Performance Monitoring, [online]
Available:
https://www.datadoghq.com/product/network-
monitoring/network-performance-monitoring/
[4] How to practically use Performance API to measure
performance, [online] Available:
https://blog.logrocket.com/how-to-practically-use-
performance-api-to-measure-performance/
[5] Performance API, [online] Available:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Performance_API
[6] SigNoz Overview, [online]
Available: https://signoz.io/docs/userguide/overview/
[7] Why Django is so impressive for developing with
PostgreSQL and Python, [online] Available:
https://www.enterprisedb.com/postgres-tutorials/why-
django-so-impressive-developing-postgresql-and-python
[8] Django Middleware, [online] Available:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/ref/middleware/
[9] M. Kumar J., S. Dubey, B. Balaji, D. Rao and D. Rao, "Data
Visualization on GitHub Repository Parameters Using
Elastic Search and Kibana," 2018 2nd International
Conference on Trends in Electronics and Informatics
(ICOEI), 2018, pp. 554-558, doi:
10.1109/ICOEI.2018.8553755.
[10] L. Dane and D. Gurkan, "NetForager: Geographically-
Distributed Network Performance Monitoring of Web
Applications," 2020 10th Annual Computing and
Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC), 2020,
pp. 0142-0149, doi: 10.1109/CCWC47524.2020.9031171.

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