I was back in Michigan a few weeks ago visiting family. These trips always involve a “what do you do?” question at some point. I’m never sure how to answer. “I have a startup.” Honestly, I don’t think of Scout as a startup. Scout is a business built the old-fashion ... Read more

Updated 3/21/2013 – The MongoDB Overview plugin discussed below has been split into 2 separate plugins: MongoDB Server Status and MongoDB Database Stats . The server status plugin reports global MongoDB metrics and the database stats plugin reports metrics specific to a particular database. John Nunemaker of Ordered List knows ... Read more

You maintain a growing Rails application and you’re seeing something peculiar. Sometimes when you use the application, it feels like the performance deteriorates significantly. However, all of your performance data shows no issues – requests in the Rails log file look speedy, CPU utilization is fine, database performance is solid, ... Read more

Older baseball players typically have plenty of power and discipline but are slow runners with lower batting averages. It’s kind of obvious: as we get older, we get bigger and more patient, but we also get slower. This characteristic even has a name, described as (you guessed it): old player ... Read more

Before Scout , my experience developing software was primarily consulting. Success was measured by delivering software on time and on budget. With Scout, a subscription-based service, my focus isn’t on scheduling. We are self-funded and we didn’t have the luxury of a venture-backed startup. We’re focused on figuring out which ... Read more

We’ve been deleting a lot of code from Scout. We’re ripping out major infrastructure, and in doing so, pulling the plug on functionality which, just six months ago, we believed would be crucial to our business. Most importantly, we’re simplifying the most complex, error-prone, and poorly-performing parts of the application. ... Read more

Our recent update to Scout featured a revised UI, more functionality, and a new Scout Agent. While it’s easy to see the changes in the UI, a lot of the work conducted by the agent happens beneath the surface. The Scout Agent, which is installed on a server you wish ... Read more

It’s been almost a year since we launched Scout , and over the past couple of months, we’ve been working on a big new release. We’ll be showing off Scout’s new features at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference on April 17th and 18th and at RailsConf on May 4th-7th. Hope ... Read more

Robin Ward of Forumwarz has released a MySQL slow queries plugin for Scout that does exactly what you’d expect: sends an alert when a slow query is run. Derek Laptop"/> The alert contains the full query along with the query time: Alert"/> Note that you’ll need to enable slow query ... Read more