July 08, 2019 In this post, we will walk through various techniques that can be used to identify the performance bottlenecks in your python codebase and optimize them. The term "optimization" can apply to a broad level of metrics. But two general metrics of most interest are; CPU performance (execution time) and memory footprint. For this post, you can think of an optimized code as the one which is either able to run faster or use lesser memory or both. There are no hard and fast rules.

July 05, 2019 Software development has changed rapidly over the last ten years. Many companies have moved away from the traditional waterfall development model to an agile methodology, and this has meant embracing continuous integration and continuous delivery practices. But how about taking it one step further with continuous deployment? Are you deploying to production automatically, without any human intervention? Some of the major products we rely on everyday are.

There is no denying the popularity of PHP. It has been a constant force in the web development world since its release way back in 1995. And now in 2019, thanks to Laravel, it is still going as strong as ever! Here at Scout, recently we have been working hard on providing a PHP performance monitoring agent to sit alongside our existing ruby, python and elixir agents.

Today we're happy to announce that our transaction timeline view has exited BETA and is now generally available for Ruby.

If you are hosting your application with Heroku, and find yourself faced with an unexplained error in your live system. What would you do next? Perhaps you don’t have a dedicated DevOps team, so where would you start your investigation? With Scout APM of course! We are going to show you how you can use Scout to find out exactly where the problem lies within your application code.

Coming back from Monitorama, I had a chance to sit back and start playing with some tools to see how they worked. Prometheus is a pretty ubiquitous tool in the monitoring space, it's pretty easy to spin up, and is open-source. Having a very active community of engaged developers means finding help articles or guides is easy. We are also going to use Grafana to build nicer looking graphs based on API queries from Prometheus.

A few members of the Scout team had the chance to head to Monitorama in Portland, Oregon this week. For those who do not know what Monitorama is, it is a 3-day, open-source monitoring conference with a single track. There is plenty of time during the breaks to chat with attendees, ask the speakers questions or just catch up on some email.

If you’re a Rails developer, then you’ve probably used Rails Logger on at least one occasion or another. Or maybe you have used it without even realizing, like when you run ‘rails server’ and it prints information to the terminal window, for example. Rails Logger provides us with a powerful way of debugging our applications and gives us an insight into understanding errors when they occur.

How are you deploying your applications in 2019? Are you using containers yet? According to recent research over 80% of you are. If you are within this group, were you initially sold on the idea of containers but found that in reality, the complexity involved with this approach makes it a difficult trade-off to justify? The community is aware of this and has come up with a remedy to ease the pain, and it’s called container orchestration.

In a recent post, we talked about Docker containers, and what you should know about them. Hopefully we cleared up any confusion you might have had about the Docker ecosystem. Perhaps with all that talk, it got you thinking about trying it out on one of your own applications? Well in this post we’d like to show you how easy it is to take your existing Ruby on Rails applications and run them inside a container.