What is Functional Monitoring?

Functional monitoring is the process of looking at the functionality offered by a single application or by a distributed system. It aims at the process of assessing the availability and functionality of the use cases of the system. It checks that the system is capable of giving desired functionality or not. Therefore It ensures that the purpose of the application is fulfilled without any malfunctioning.

How does it work?

The functional monitoring is the middle layer of the monitoring process. In monitoring process, the low level is Technical monitoring and the Business Process monitoring is the higher level monitoring. If we take an example of an organization then we see that most of the work is done by human rather than robots. They include people in some housekeeping works. Functional monitoring is performed automatically using some scripts or machine. It is usually performed by employing robots to execute scripted operations on a system. As we know no one is perfect in this world and of course, we are human. So, We can’t do any work with 100% perfection. At this point of time, we need machines or robots to do this.

The functional monitoring is also a robot-based monitoring. Therefore, It is excellent for management reports on the quality of service that the users of a system experience. It is based on the specifications of the software component or the system component which is monitored other than the generic parameters of the component. It helps in monitoring that each function of the application adheres to the requirement specification of the application.

Challenges in Functional monitoring

First of all functional monitoring checks the quality of the application. Therefore, It is important that all the major and minor functionalities of the application be monitored because a small glitch can degrade the quality of the application. A normal user who has no technical idea would never know when the database has stopped due to some reason and he cannot log in. Hence he has no idea what happened and he would leave the system. At this point of time, functional monitoring is needed. Other than this functional monitoring should be real time and should be able to provide alerts using a notification system. It should also be able to tell the impact on the users of the system in case of malfunctioning.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I want to say that don’t test your luck and must use some functional monitoring tool for your application. Often applications which passed functional testing and regression testing with no issues fails in production due to differences between the configurations of test and production environment, real-world data, hardware problems etc. But some partial problems still persists in the system. Therefore, the functional monitoring becomes helpful in this scenario by identifying which component failed in the production environment and why. So don’t take any risk and use the functional monitoring for your system.