I'm an engineer by trade. I rely on intuition when investigating a slow Django app. I've solved a lot of performance issues over the years and the short cuts my brain takes often work. However, intuition can fail. It can fail hard in complex Django apps with many layers (ex: ... Read more

Forecasting traffic to your web app is important for capacity planning, but generating a seasonally accurate model of your traffic is pretty daunting. If you under-forecast: Your app servers may become oversaturated, and requests will start backing up in a queue. If you over-forecast you may end up overspending. Read more

Scout makes monitoring the performance of Django apps affordable and approachable in just a couple of lines of code. Read more

I don't know of an easier way to deploy a Django app than letting Heroku do the work. That said, how do you stay on top of your app's performance, errors, and stability post-launch? Running an app on Heroku is a blissful experience, but it presents some monitoring challenges that ... Read more

This post covers instrumenting a Django app with StatsD. StatsD is logging for metrics and is the missing swiss army knife in your measurement toolbelt. Read more

The Django ORM makes it easy to fetch data, but there's a downside: it's easy to write inefficient queries as the number of records in your database grows. Read more

The New Relic price tag goes up dramatically as your server footprint grows. This might not be an issue if you are utilizing New Relic's full product suite, but what if you just care about error and performance monitoring? In that case, there's a solution that offers richer features as ... Read more

Most of a web page's load time is on the front-end. You can monitor the performance of the end-to-end page load time with a Real User Monitoring (RUM) service, and one of the more attractive ones is Raygun Pulse . Let's take a deep dive. Installing Raygun Pulse Installing Pulse ... Read more

Performance in almost all web apps - including Rails - follows an 80/20 rule: most of your performance problems will be contained within a small amount of the application code. Read more

You're probably confused where DataDog and Scout overlap. You're not alone! They've each offered similar products since their inception, and come on, they both have dogs in their logos! Here's a timeline to clear things up: Both Scout (2009) and DataDog (2010) started around the same time and focused on ... Read more