Looking for a fresh, 2018 approach to deploying a Rails app to AWS? We've partnered with DailyDrip on a series of videos to guide you through the process. We're covering how to Dockerize a Rails app, AWS Fargate, logging, monitoring, setting up load balancing, SSL, CDN, and more. In today's ... Read more

We've partnered with DailyDrip on a two-part series guiding you through Automated Backups and Disaster Recovery on AWS. This is part 2. You can read part 1 here . This is the second portion of a two-part series on automated backups and disaster recovery for AWS. In part 1 , ... Read more

> We've partnered with DailyDrip on a two-part series guiding you through Automated Backups and Disaster Recovery on AWS. This is part 1. Read part 2 , which covers read replicas and multi-az. Have you ever lost data? It can make for a bad day. Now, imagine you lose your ... Read more

It's a lot harder connecting the dots of the request lifecycle when the final response is built from a number of separate microservices. However, distributed tracing - which connects a transaction trace across microservices - is getting a lot easier. In this short tutorial, I'll show how to add distributed ... Read more

A transaction trace is a GPS system for web performance: it paints a rich picture of the flow of a web request through your code. So, why doesn't everybody trace? I believe there are two reasons: Complex instrumentation : Adding in-app tracing instrumentation is more involved than calling logger.info() for ... Read more

OH - "Observability - because devs don't like to do "monitoring" we need to package it in new nomenclature to make it palatable and trendy". — Cindy Sridharan (@copyconstruct) July 28, 2017 I think you'll be hearing more about observability in 2018. In this post, I share why I believe ... 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

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

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

The latest release (0.3.0) of Scout's Elixir APM package adds the ability to monitor GenServer calls. What is GenServer and how do you monitor it? A short intro to GenServer If you're coming from a Ruby background, you've probably used Sidekiq or similar to do background work outside of the ... Read more