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

To inspire hard work, some young men hang a poster on their wall that includes: (1) an exotic sports car (2) a scantly clad lady and (3) a beach house. My inspirational poster would be much less attractive: a friendly butler who offers time-honored wisdom (with an accent because people ... 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

It takes longer to access data stored on your hard disk vs. RAM . But how big is the difference? It’s really big. How can you tell if you your web application is being impacted by slow disk access? What impacts I/O performance? What’s the best path to fixing the ... 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

When checking the amount of free memory on a Linux server, it’s easy to think you’re running out of memory when you’re not. For example, here’s the output of free -m on a server with 4GB of RAM : With a quick glance, you might start sweating. Only 39 MB ... Read more