Monitoring the Relay Proxy

Overview

This topic explains best practices for monitoring the Relay Proxy as it runs, as well as information about exporting metrics and other data.

Using the Relay Proxy's status resource

The Relay Proxy exposes a status resource containing details about its health. To learn about the status resource, read the Relay Proxy GitHub repository's Status (health check).

Validating your Relay Proxy configuration

Fluctuating network conditions can cause a temporary loss of connection. The Relay proxy is self-healing and will re-establish connectivity with LaunchDarkly automatically.

You can check your Relay Proxy configuration using status requests and flag evaluation tests.

Status requests

You can make a GET request to the /status URL path for information about the Relay Proxy's configured environments. There is no authentication required for this request.

Here's how:

To view an example output for this request, read the Relay Proxy GitHub repository's Service endpoints.

Testing feature flag evaluations

If your environment configurations are valid, you can check your connection by evaluating a feature flag.

Here's how to test your connection and evaluate a flag:

1. Start your SDK. If the SDK connects successfully, the Relay Proxy is working.

2. In the LaunchDarkly user interface (UI), change the value of a feature flag so you will receive a different variation in production.
3. Verify in your application that the flag value has changed.

Alternatively, you can validate your Relay Proxy with curl. You must specify your Relay Proxy base URI, SDK key, and evaluation context in the command.

Here's how:

To learn more, read Troubleshooting SDK connection to Relay.

Testing Relay Proxy performance

Load tests designed to measure the Relay Proxy’s performance under load should initialize LaunchDarkly client instances and connect them to your Relay Proxy hardware.

We developed a load testing framework for the Relay Proxy based on Locust. You can find it on in the LaunchDarkly Labs GitHub repository. Locust tests events, client-side SDKs, and server-side SDKs. Locust's internal nomenclature uses the term "users" to refer to simulated SDKs. Do not mistake Locust's "users" with LaunchDarkly's user contexts. They are not the same thing.

The Relay Proxy instance you test against should be:

• Deployed on the same type of hardware you intend to use for your production deployment
• Configured to manage LaunchDarkly environments comparable to production

Performance is always dependent on specific workload and environment. You can run benchmarks against your own infrastructure and LaunchDarkly configuration for more accurate information. We recommend that you configure the Relay Proxy to be highly available, which reduces load on any particular server. To learn more, read Relay Proxy guidelines.

A single server-side SDK can support many customers. In the case of client-side SDKs, this may correlate with a specific end user, because a client-side SDK is configured for a particular context.

Monitoring Relay Proxy performance

When the Relay Proxy is running, you can monitor performance by tracking the following statistics:

• Overall memory utilization
• CPU utilization
• Number of requests coming into the Relay Proxy

These numbers help you understand how frequently the Relay Proxy is used and how resource-intensive it is.

Monitoring the Relay Proxy with a data store

If you have connected the Relay Proxy to a data store, you should also monitor the capacity of the data store and how many hits or misses occur during data lookups. If there are a lot of misses or the data store is nearing capacity, it may be overflowing during high-traffic periods and need more capacity.

To learn more about monitoring your data store, read the documentation from your data store provider.

Exporting metrics and traces

You can configure the Relay Proxy to export statistics, requests received, and route traces to Datadog, Stackdriver, and Prometheus by using the OpenCensus protocol. The Relay Proxy only exports metrics when an SDK is connected to it.

To learn more about configuring the Relay Proxy to export metrics and traces, read the Relay Proxy GitHub repository's Metrics integrations.