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

Tracking down slow code is about to get a lot faster. We're excited to debut our Github Integration for Scout Application Monitoring: With the Github Integration enabled, instead of seeing backtraces for slow method calls (>= 500 ms), you'll see the relevant code in our UI. This goes beyond the ... 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

If I was teaching Server Health 101, I'd start with four key metrics: CPU Usage Memory Usage Network I/O Disk Utilization The approach for fetching these metrics on Linux hosts is tried-and-true (hint: look in the /proc folder). However, I was curious about Docker Containers: where do I access these ... 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

Last week, I spent Thursday (4/23/15) and Friday (4/24/15) at DevOpsDaysRox . If you've never attended a DevOpsDays events - find your closest one here and signup now. So what makes DevOps Day special? First, you'll find an active community that prides itself on inclusion and making everyone feel welcome. ... Read more

When it comes to agent-based monitoring and Docker , you're typically choosing between two bad options: (1) install the agent and its dependencies directly on the host or (2) running an agent in every container. Installing the agent on the host is bad : Docker is best when everything is ... Read more