High monitoring overhead is a silent killer : your app's requests take longer, throughput capacity shrinks, end users requests start stacking up in a request queue, you react by provisioning more servers, and finally, more servers == more $$$. So how does Scout's overhead compare with the competition? To find ... Read more

What's a Rails stacks look like in the wild these days? Most popular Rails version? Most popular Ruby? Is Delayed Job still hanging on? 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 ... Read more

Logging is the lowest common denominator of monitoring - it's low effort and low overhead. You can put ANYTHING into a log file (sans animated GIF memes - save that for Slack). The downside of being a logging addict: logs can quickly become a noisy mess. Digging through logs while ... Read more

Here's a behind-the-scenes rundown of how we ensure our apps are in peak condition in 2020 Read more

Our Stackprof-inspired profiler, ScoutProf, is now in BETA. See our docs to get started. The holy grail of performance profiling is finding a tool that's safe to run in production. A tool that identifies slow code as it works "in the wild". Profiling code locally is never as good as ... Read more

Application monitoring doesn't have to be complicated. Introducing scout_statsd_rack , a drop-in Ruby gem for monitoring key performance metrics in your Rails app. scout_statsd_rack leverages StatsD for lightweight Rails app monitoring via Rack middleware. Lets see how fast we can go from no monitoring to a Rails performance dashboard plus ... Read more

Photo by mollypop My how you’ve grown! A couple of years ago your little Rails app was on a single server. Now you’re on a whole cluster – you’ve got web servers, database servers, HAProxy servers, and more. I’m so proud of you! Monitoring your Rails cluster has gotten more ... 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

Say your Rails application is running in production and it’s getting good traffic, but performance isn’t as good you would like. You’ve already determined that your database is not the bottleneck. What’s your next move? Well, there is a good chance that Passenger’s PassengerMaxPoolSize needs to be adjusted. 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