Is it worth the effort involved? Yes absolutely it is. I always tell the developers that I work with that the most important thing we can do is figure out a w

Is it worth the effort involved? Yes absolutely it is. I always tell the developers that I work with that the most important thing we can do is figure out a way to "peek" inside our systems. Keeping statistics o "background" metrics and displaying them on a simple webpage using plots can be very useful in discovering problems that would be otherwise impossible to notice. There are many things which are easy to QA because you can visually see them. On the other hand there are many things which are hard to ensure top notch quality because there's nothing to "see". For example, if your system gets sluggish how many users were viewing your site, what was the CPU usage, memory usage, etc. Having cron jobs or other statistical capturing systems which you can use to store and plot data can help you understand when a problem happens. Then you can look for similar patterns and debug the issue. I work with a system which is rich in algorithm and we keep lots statistics on every major algorithm. That way, if we modify an algorithm or add data to our system we can see if there's any abnormal behavior. We've learned what acceptable is and how to identify problems by looking at the plots we generate with the captured data. I wouldn't do anything overly complicated. We use the google chart api, easy to use and very fast. http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ http://code.google.com/apis/chart/