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

Updated 3/21/2013 – The MongoDB Overview plugin discussed below has been split into 2 separate plugins: MongoDB Server Status and MongoDB Database Stats . The server status plugin reports global MongoDB metrics and the database stats plugin reports metrics specific to a particular database. John Nunemaker of Ordered List knows ... 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

Thanks to Jacob Harris , we have a MongoDB Slow Queries plugin for Scout. The MongoDB plugin captures the number of slow queries per minute according to the threshold you specify. It also reports details of any slow queries that take place. Of course, like any other Scout plugin, you ... Read more

~ or ~ Sysadmin Eye for the Dev Guy Developers! You can churn out a Rails or Sinatra app in no time. What about putting it out there in production? Occasionally forget the syntax for crontab or logrotate? Yeah, me too. That's why I wrote up a few essential notes ... Read more

Older baseball players typically have plenty of power and discipline but are slow runners with lower batting averages. It’s kind of obvious: as we get older, we get bigger and more patient, but we also get slower. This characteristic even has a name, described as (you guessed it): old player ... 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

Before Scout , my experience developing software was primarily consulting. Success was measured by delivering software on time and on budget. With Scout, a subscription-based service, my focus isn’t on scheduling. We are self-funded and we didn’t have the luxury of a venture-backed startup. We’re focused on figuring out which ... Read more

We’ve been deleting a lot of code from Scout. We’re ripping out major infrastructure, and in doing so, pulling the plug on functionality which, just six months ago, we believed would be crucial to our business. Most importantly, we’re simplifying the most complex, error-prone, and poorly-performing parts of the application. ... Read more

Our recent update to Scout featured a revised UI, more functionality, and a new Scout Agent. While it’s easy to see the changes in the UI, a lot of the work conducted by the agent happens beneath the surface. The Scout Agent, which is installed on a server you wish ... Read more