We are happy to announce that Scout now integrates with the popular error monitoring solution, Honeybadger. This integration brings a similar feature set to our existing Rollbar, Sentry and Bugsnag integrations, and it allows you to see your errors and exceptions alongside your performance metrics all on a single page. So let’s take this opportunity to take a closer look at Honeybadger and see how you can get it setup within Scout in just a few minutes! Read more

One of the joys of using the Ruby language is the many different ways that you can solve the same problem, it’s a very expressive language with a rich set of libraries. But how do we know which is the best, most efficient, use of the language? When we are talking about algorithms which are critical to the performance of your application, understanding the most efficient approach to take is essential. Perhaps you’ve been using Scout to hunt down issues, and now that you have found an issue, you want to optimize it. Ruby’s Benchmark module provides a very handy way for you to compare and contrast possible optimizations, and when used in conjunction with a good APM solution it will ensure that you have all bases covered. Let’s take a look at how you can get started with it today! Read more

Most people have an inkling of what the load averages mean: the three numbers represent averages over progressively longer periods of time (one, five, and fifteen-minute averages), and that lower numbers are better. Higher numbers represent a problem or an overloaded machine. Read more

There is no doubt that looking at response times and memory usage is essential to understanding the general health and performance of your application. But as I am sure you are aware, there is more than one way to monitor an application. Approaching monitoring from a different angle can be a powerful way of gaining new insights. If all you did was watch for high response times or areas of memory bloat, then you might overlook something far more simple: the user’s general level of satisfaction. So how can we monitor this rather broad concept of user satisfaction? Well, we can monitor this with a rather useful metric known as the Apdex score... Read more

With the official release of Rails 6 just around the corner, we round up all the major new features coming your way. It is an exciting release due to some big features coming upstream from the Basecamp and GitHub projects. Amongst the many minor updates, useful tweaks and bug fixes, Rails 6 will ship with two completely new frameworks: ActionText and ActionMailbox, and two big scalable-by-default features: parallel testing and multiple database support. So set your Gemfile to get Rails 6.0.0.rc1 and let’s get started! Read more

The Ruby app server ecosystem has consolidated around three app servers: Unicorn, Puma, and Passenger 5. What specific problems must an app server solve for Ruby? How do you pick the right app server? Read more

In this post, we will walk through various techniques that can be used to identify the performance bottlenecks in your python codebase and optimize them. Read more

Software development has changed rapidly over the last ten years. Many companies have moved away from the traditional waterfall development model to an agile methodology, and this has meant embracing continuous integration and continuous delivery practices. But how about taking it one step further with continuous deployment? Are you deploying to production automatically, without any human intervention? Some of the major products we rely on everyday are. We take a look at some of the best continuous deployment tools and put them head-to-head. Read more

There is no denying the popularity of PHP. It has been a constant force in the web development world since its release way back in 1995. And now in 2019, thanks to Laravel, it is still going as strong as ever! Here at Scout, recently we have been working hard on providing a PHP performance monitoring agent to sit alongside our existing ruby, python and elixir agents. Prior to us releasing this PHP agent, let’s take a look at the PHP ecosystem to see how Scout can complement the existing monitoring landscape. Read more

Disk I/O encompasses the input/output operations on a physical disk. Read more