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JavaScript Internals: Garbage Collection

Garbage collection (GC) is a very important process for all programming languages, whether it’s done manually (in low-level languages like C), or automatically. The curious thing is that most of us barely stop to think about how JavaScript — which is a programming language, and hence, needs to GC — does the trick. Like the majority of high-level languages, JavaScript allocates its objects and values to memory and releases them when they’re no longer needed. But, how?

AppSignal is Free for Open-Source Software & "For Good" Projects

Whether you write code to save the bees, build the latest CMS, or teach others to become a developer: we’ve got your back. We’ve always offered AppSignal for free to maintainers and do-gooders who asked, such as Elixir School, Code::Stats and the MEANS Database. Starting today, we want to spread the word to all open-source maintainers and volunteer organizations that AppSignal is 100% free for them.

Capabilities of Elixir's Logger

Logs are an important part of your application and logging shouldn’t be one of the last things you think of. You should configure your log system, formatter, and style as soon as you start the development of your app. Also, do your best to document the process and share how it works with the rest of your team. In this article, we’re going to demonstrate how logs work in Elixir. We’ll jump into Elixir’s Logger module, which brings a lot of power to logging features.

Launching AppSignal Monitoring for Node.js 1.0

Do you know how many errors your Node.js application had last week? How many users were affected? Which servers were high on CPU/Memory/Disk? If you do know, how many different tools did you have to install, and how many hours you’ve spent configuring all those tools? AppSignal is here to change the way you monitor your apps and simplify your life as a developer. Today, we officially launch the 1.0 version of @appsignal/node.js.

Exploring Node.js Async Hooks

Have you ever heard of Node.js async hooks module? If the answer is no, then you should get familiar with it. Even though it’s new stuff (released along with Node.js 9) and the module is still in experimental mode, which means it’s not recommended for production, you should still get to know it a bit better. In short, Node.js async hooks, more specifically the async_hooks module, provides a clear and easy-to-use API to track async resources in Node.js.

Monitoring Any System with StatsD and AppSignal's Standalone Agent

Application monitoring alone is not always enough to get the full picture of your systems. Frequently, services running in satellite apps (or supporting apps) can have an acute impact on your day-to-day operations. Database servers are well-known examples of this. Backup scripts and other background jobs can also slow systems and are often overlooked. AppSignal does not watch these satellite processes by default.

The Diagnose: How Support Works at AppSignal

Setting up AppSignal isn’t as complex as rocket science. Developer experience is really important to us, as AppSignal started as a way to scratch our itch. We also put a lot of effort in providing you with a first-class developer support. In fact, our developers are the ones answering all of your your technical questions. This is why we’ve added a diagnose tool to our Node.js integration.

Improved Pagerduty Integration with Detailed Alerts

AppSignal now supports the next API version of PagerDuty. 🎉 One of our devs was on support rotation the other day, and a customer asked whether we could add support for the next API version of PagerDuty. We won’t tell you who it was, but this developer typically answers questions by solving things as quickly as he can. So, two days later, boom! The improved integration for Pagerduty went live.

Node.js Resiliency Concepts: Recovery and Self-Healing

In an ideal world where we reached 100% test coverage, our error handling was flawless, and all our failures were handled gracefully — in a world where all our systems reached perfection, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Yet, here we are. Earth, 2020. By the time you read this sentence, somebody’s server failed in production. A moment of silence for the processes we lost.