A database is a shared resource for a Rails application. A single misbehaving query hitting your database can slow down unrelated queries throughout your system. When we began running our own database monitoring against our apps, we discovered several expensive queries that weren't apparent when viewing individual web endpoints and ... Read more

Rails Postgres Guru Greg Navis shares another powerful tip. Greg is writing The Ultimate Guide to Deploying Rails on Heroku. Subscribe to his mailing list for performance tips & tricks. In my previous article on Postgres Trigrams , we used pg_trgm to speed up LIKE and other operators (even on ... Read more

A year ago, our team started playing with Elixir. We liked it - a lot. In fact, it's the first language we've used since Ruby that we'd unanimously love to build web apps with. With that, we're excited to announce BETA support for Elixir app monitoring @ Scout. Get started ... Read more

> We've added one of the top feature requets to app monitoring: alerting. Alerting keeps your team updated if your app's performance degrades. Alerts can be configured on the app as a whole and on individual endpoints. Metrics include: mean response time 95th percentile response time Apdex error rate throughput ... Read more

Along with a couple other members of the Scout team, I'm heading to sunny Phoenix, Arizona in mid-April for RailsConf . I'm a performance addict, so I've been scanning through the sessions and making notes of the ones that stand out. My performance short-list is below. 1. What's my app ... Read more

Finding profilers that reliably work with little effort was a bigger challenge than I thought. Here's a summary of the Rails profiler ecosystem: what works, what doesn't, and each profiler's niche. Read more

Exceptions happen. To everyone. For half a decade, Honeybadger has given sanity to the art of bug hunting, monitoring exceptions for Heroku, eBay, DigitalOcean, and many more. I was able to steal some time from Ben Curtis, one of the Honeybadger co-founders, to talk about their origin story, life as ... Read more

Are folks upgrading to Rails 5? Where is the Postgres vs. MySQL battle heading? Are devs embracing Puma and concurrency? If you're curious about the above, you've come to the right place. We collect gems used on the apps we monitor at Scout to assist with debugging issues and to ... Read more

We've pushed a lot of features this year at Scout. Here's a look back at what we've added to app monitoring in 2016: February Completed a significant effort reducing our agent resource usage and open-sourced our agent overhead benchmarks . April Sidekiq monitoring Backtraces for N+1 queries ( background on ... Read more

I follow a simple rule before configuring a monitoring alert: if I receive this alert at 3am, will I act on it? If not, it shouldn't be an alert. Few performance-related alerts meet this criteria. For example, if our app is running 25% slower, it's not worth a hasty 3am ... Read more