During a team camp among the lofty peaks of Breckenridge, Colorado, we talked a lot about the future of Scout and monitoring in general. Big mountains and nature have a way of doing that. One thing that was getting our nerd juices flowing: Go . At Monitorima in May, it ... Read more

A big thanks to Eric Lindvall of Papertrail for adding steal time to Scout's CPU Usage Plugin and helping out on this blog post! Netflix tracks CPU Steal Time closely. In fact, if steal time exceeds their chosen threshold, they shut down the virtual machine and restart on a different ... Read more

On Jan 15th, all Scout accounts will be switched over to notification groups. Notification groups are designed to make notifiation management easier and more flexible: instead of managing notifications per-plugin/per-user, you will assign users to notification groups, and apply notification groups to triggers. you can have multiple PagerDuty integrations and ... Read more

Every man has their breaking point when it comes to deadweight code. Andre and I hit ours recently and decided to spend all of last week focusing soley on cleaning up Scout (a Rails app). Our goals: Faster tests – our tests took 8 minutes to complete. While it’s the ... Read more

We’ve added prolific plugin contributor Eric Lindvall ’s latest plugins to Scout: Kestrel Overall and Kestrel Queue Monitoring . Kestrel is a simple message queue built from production needs at Twitter. Being the gentleman he is, Eric shared his experiences with Kestrel at Papertrail , a hosted log aggregation service. ... Read more

Got a site you need to serve up via SSL ? Here are your Cliffs notes. This assumes 1) your site already runs without SSL ; 2) you’re using Apache and Ubuntu; 3) you don’t want any browser warnings, so no self-signed certificates. 1. Generate a Private Key $ openssl ... Read more

First, Tina Fey needs to write more. Both of her New Yorker articles have been terrific. Second, her latest New Yorker piece had a great nugget on how producing is about discouraging creativity: You may have an occasion where the script calls for a bran muffin on a white plate, ... Read more

John P. Wood of Signal , which offers a mobile customer engagement platform used by many top brands, recently created a couple of Scout Plugins for monitoring CouchDB . I’ve always been impressed by the team at Signal, so I was curious how they were using CouchDB in production. It ... 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

If you’ve used Major Hayden’s MySQLTuner before, you know it’s a great source of MySQL optimization tips. Now you can get MySQLTuner reports automatically delivered through Scout. All you need to do is install the MySQL Stats w/MySQLTuner plugin , or update the plugin if you already have it installed. ... Read more