Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Background task processing is something that many developers may encounter when building Elixir applications. This might include sending emails asynchronously, posting and fetching data from an API, and more. Oban, a powerful and persistent job processing library, offers a reliable way to handle background tasks, scheduled operations, and more. However, like any complex system, Oban requires careful monitoring to ensure its smooth operation, identify bottlenecks, and prevent unexpected failures.

Over time, web applications have evolved from simple request/response-based systems into complex, distributed ones with lots of moving parts. If something goes wrong (and you can be sure it will), finding the cause can be nearly impossible. But this need not be the case: enter tracing. Tracing refers to the process of collecting detailed information about the execution of requests within an application, including function calls, execution time, and other relevant data.

In this guide, we'll harness AppSignal to detect, diagnose, and remove performance bottlenecks and employ proper tracing in a Ruby on Rails application. From setting up tracing to capturing errors and logging, we’ve got you covered. We'll ensure our application runs smoother than ever, even under the heaviest loads! But first, let's quickly touch on how to define tracing and its benefits.

Database performance can make or break your Elixir application. While Ecto provides a powerful toolkit for database interactions, understanding how these operations perform in production is critical. Whether you're dealing with slow queries, connection pool issues, or mysterious N+1 problems, the ability to effectively monitor and optimize your database operations can be the difference between a sluggish application and one that delights your users.

In August 2012, we set out to build a fairly priced, developer-centric APM and logging platform that we’d love to use ourselves. Soon after, AppSignal was born and quickly gained traction. Despite operating in a competitive market, we’ve become a household name among many of our peers, now serving over 2,000 organizations across six continents.

Silent failures — like missed cron jobs, database crashes, or backup issues — can cause real damage if they go unnoticed. Traditional monitoring often focuses on requests and server metrics but misses crucial background processes. This creates a significant monitoring blind spot where critical elements of your application can fail without immediate detection. To help eliminate this blind spot, we've introduced AppSignal Wrap.

When an incident occurs, you need to assign a clear owner for a swift resolution. You can now more easily assign issues, filter by severity, and track their progress in AppSignal — all from one centralized place. In this post, we'll walk through improvements we've made to the assigned issues page to help your team collaborate effectively and improve app performance, one issue at a time.

As a project manager for a small Rails agency, I find it challenging to keep track of every client’s application. Is the site live? Is it stable? Do we have a silent issue that frequently rears its head? AppSignal makes things like anomaly detection, uptime monitoring, and issue resolution easy, even for a non-technical project manager!

You can now connect multiple Heroku apps to a single AppSignal instance with the AppSignal add-on. We've also improved our installation wizard to help you get up and monitoring even quicker, so you can start tracking your apps in no time.

We've enhanced our application performance monitoring capabilities to give you a granular view of your application's behavior with minutely metrics. Now, when you select specific time ranges in your charts, you can see short-term trends, spot anomalies faster, and gain deeper insights into your application's performance.