One of the joys of using the Ruby language is the many different ways that you can solve the same problem, it’s a very expressive language with a rich set of libraries. But how do we know which is the best, most efficient, use of the language? When we are talking about algorithms which are critical to the performance of your application, understanding the most efficient approach to take is essential. Perhaps you’ve been using Scout to hunt down issues, and now that you have found an issue, you want to optimize it. Ruby’s Benchmark module provides a very handy way for you to compare and contrast possible optimizations, and when used in conjunction with a good APM solution it will ensure that you have all bases covered. Let’s take a look at how you can get started with it today!

Some members of the Tokyo Scout team travelled to Taipei last week to take part in RubyConf Taiwan. It was the first time that Scout has sponsored this event, so we were very excited to be invited to take part! During the conference we had the opportunity to speak with many interesting developers from all over Taiwan and Asia. It was a fantastic opportunity to show Scout in a new environment and to make connections with Ruby developers from all across Asia.

There is no doubt that looking at response times and memory usage is essential to understanding the general health and performance of your application. But as I am sure you are aware, there is more than one way to monitor an application. Approaching monitoring from a different angle can be a powerful way of gaining new insights. If all you did was watch for high response times or areas of memory bloat, then you might overlook something far more simple: the user’s general level of satisfaction. So how can we monitor this rather broad concept of user satisfaction? Well, we can monitor this with a rather useful metric known as the Apdex score...

Some of the Scout members travelled from Tokyo to Ireland via boats and trains… and no planes! On day 18 of the 20 day adventure, we had our first London drink-up! We hosted the event at Guy Ritchie's old pub called The Punchbowl.

With the official release of Rails 6 just around the corner, we round up all the major new features coming your way. It is an exciting release due to some big features coming upstream from the Basecamp and GitHub projects. Amongst the many minor updates, useful tweaks and bug fixes, Rails 6 will ship with two completely new frameworks: ActionText and ActionMailbox, and two big scalable-by-default features: parallel testing and multiple database support. So set your Gemfile to get Rails 6.0.0.rc1 and let’s get started!

Optimizing performance in Python What does "Optimizing" code mean anyway? The term "optimization" can apply to a broad level of metrics. But two general metrics of most interest are; CPU performance (execution time) and memory footprint. For this post, you can think of an optimized code as the one which ...

Software development has changed rapidly over the last ten years. Many companies have moved away from the traditional waterfall development model to an agile methodology, and this has meant embracing continuous integration and continuous delivery practices. But how about taking it one step further with continuous deployment? Are you deploying to production automatically, without any human intervention? Some of the major products we rely on everyday are. We take a look at some of the best continuous deployment tools and put them head-to-head.

There is no denying the popularity of PHP. It has been a constant force in the web development world since its release way back in 1995. And now in 2019, thanks to Laravel, it is still going as strong as ever! Here at Scout, recently we have been working hard on providing a PHP performance monitoring agent to sit alongside our existing ruby, python and elixir agents. Prior to us releasing this PHP agent, let’s take a look at the PHP ecosystem to see how Scout can complement the existing monitoring landscape.

Today we're happy to announce that our transaction timeline view has exited BETA and is now available for all Ruby apps monitored by Scout.

If you are hosting your application with Heroku, and find yourself faced with an unexplained error in your live system. What would you do next? Perhaps you don’t have a dedicated DevOps team, so where would you start your investigation? With Scout APM of course! We are going to show you how you can use Scout to find out exactly where the problem lies within your application code. We are going to walk through two of the most common Heroku error codes and show you how to diagnose the problem with Scout quickly and efficiently.