Most web apps can benefit from a background queue, often used to process error-prone or time-consuming side jobs. These background jobs can vary from sending emails, to updating caches, to performing core business logic. As any background queueing system scales the number of jobs it needs to process, the pool of workers processing those jobs needs to scale as well.
Today, we dip our toes into collecting custom metrics with a standalone agent. We’ll be taking our own Kafka brokers and using the StatsD protocol to get the metrics into AppSignal. This post is for those with some experience in using monitoring tools, and who want to take monitoring to every corner of their architecture, or want to add their own metrics to their monitoring setup.
A majority of front-end developers deal with this buzzword all the time: V8. A big part of its popularity is due to the fact that it led JavaScript to a new level of performance. Yes, V8 is very fast. But, how does it perform its magic and why is it so responsive? The official docs state that “V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, written in C++. It is used in Chrome and Node.js, among others”.
You can now monitor any metrics you’d like in your Node.js app with AppSignal. With custom metrics and minutely probes by your side, you’ll now have an excellent overview of your app. If you’ve ever thought “I wish we measured this specific thing so I could monitor better what is going on…”, then this feature is perfect for you.
An SCM such as Git is more than just a database for source code. It’s not only the thing you need to interact with to get code to production, but also a log of changes on a project. It’s not just the last couple of weeks of commits that are worth looking at. Any commit remains relevant weeks, months and years later. A commit serves multiple purposes. The first one is to explain a change during its review and the second is to explain a change to a future reader.
Erlang & Elixir are ready for asynchronous work right off the bat. Generally speaking, background job systems aren’t needed as much as in other ecosystems but they still have their place for particular use cases. This post goes through a few best practices I often try to think of in advance when writing background jobs, so that I don’t hit some of the pain points that have hurt me multiple times in the past.
We’ve deployed a major overhaul of how you create dashboards and graphs in AppSignal. Using dashboards is now way easier and smoother, and we’re a bit too excited about this. 🚀
Today, we’ve added a magic dashboard to the Node integration that shows you the performance and volume of your PostgreSQL queries.
Today, we’ll dive into N+1 queries—what they are, how to spot them, why they have such an impact, and how to solve them.
REST has reigned for a long time in the world of web services. It’s easy to implement, allows standardization through RESTful patterns and has lots of libraries that support and facilitate its development. Then came GraphQL, the famous query language for APIs.
