Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

We're excited to share that AppSignal has once again been recognized as one of the top performance and error monitoring tools in the 2024 Ruby on Rails Community Survey. This year, we maintained our position as the fifth most popular performance monitoring tool and climbed from seventh to fourth place in the error tracking rankings. This result means that AppSignal now stands shoulder-to-shoulder alongside some much larger competitors that are backed by a combined $600 million in venture capital funding.

AppSignal is excited to announce that we've given our charts a major makeover, making them more powerful and user-friendly. We've rebuilt our charts from the ground up.

Imagine stepping into the role of a DevOps engineer at an online learning company that utilizes Open edX as its core Learning Management System (LMS). As the platform scales to accommodate more learners, a myriad of challenges begin to surface: These are just the tip of the iceberg. It's pivotal that you provide timely reports on site performance and error tracking in real time, and fix any issues before they affect a significant user base.

We're excited to introduce Check-ins, our no-fuss solution to monitoring your scheduled jobs and continuous processes. AppSignal Check-ins allow you to seamlessly monitor the scheduling, run times, and health of your scheduled jobs and processes, with a simple setup using helpers or API endpoints. In this post, we'll introduce you to the new Check-ins feature and show you how to start monitoring your app's background processes with AppSignal.