Alerts and notifications are the backbone of any Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool, ensuring your team is immediately aware of critical issues. At AppSignal, we’re always improving our toolkit to help you stay ahead of problems before they impact performance or reliability. We've made huge improvements to how you can manage your app notifications and alerts with AppSignal.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to integrate AppSignal with a Flask application running on AWS Fargate. Fargate is a serverless container service that allows you to run Docker containers in the cloud. By integrating AppSignal with AWS Fargate, you can monitor the performance of your Flask application and get insights.

We're excited to announce that AppSignal now offers improved monitoring for long-running streaming Rack responses. Our improved Rack response monitoring means you can gain deeper visibility into the health of your Ruby application's long-running responses, allowing you to catch errors that may arise minutes or even hours after a request's body is served. This new layer of observability results from a valuable contribution from Julik Tarkhanov, Director of Engineering at Cheddar Payments.

When a system runs slowly, our first thought might be that it’s failing. This common reaction underscores a key point: In the world of web applications, even milliseconds matter. Performance impacts user satisfaction and operational efficiency, making it a critical factor. In this article, we'll show you how to use AppSignal to monitor and improve the performance of your Flask applications.

We’ve added two new ways to work with your data in AppSignal: Dataset Exporting and Graph Data Exporting. These features make it easier to analyze and share insights, whether you’re debugging, reporting, or collaborating with your team.

Having previously compared the top 5 Datadog alternatives and the top 5 alternatives to Honeybadger, this time we'll compare Sentry against five competing application performance monitoring (APM) tools, so that you can find the best choice for you. We'll compare Sentry to AppSignal first, then Honeybadger, Datadog, New Relic, and Scout.

We're excited to announce that AppSignal now supports Pino logs, making managing and monitoring your logging data easier than ever. By sending Pino logs directly to AppSignal, you can consolidate all your data in one place, giving you a clear overview of your app's performance for faster troubleshooting. Importantly, AppSignal now also works with Fastify 5, making it a great choice for Fastify developers looking for an APM that integrates seamlessly with their stack.

In the first part of this series, we explored how AppSignal can significantly enhance the robustness of Open edX platforms. We saw the challenges that Open edX faces as it scales and how AppSignal's features — including real-time performance monitoring and automated error tracking — provide essential tools for DevOps teams. Our walkthrough covered the initial setup and integration of AppSignal with Open edX, highlighting the immediate benefits of this powerful observability framework.

In Rails, we're more likely to use SQL databases than other frameworks. Unlike NoSQL databases, which can be scaled horizontally with relative ease, SQL databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL are much less amenable to easy scaling. As a result, our database usually becomes the primary bottleneck as our business grows. Although SQL databases are very efficient, as our growing customer base puts an increasing load on our servers, we begin scaling our instance counts, workers, etc.