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.

Automating client onboarding can eliminate the tedious task of cloning dashboards, creating group directory structure, setting up reports, and configuring access roles. All of these tasks are prone to human error and to put it mildly, not really fun to do. In this blog, we’ll walk through a PowerShell script to automate some of these tasks.

Among developers, alerts have a bad rep. But outside the coding environment, alerts can signify positive developments. For example, a microwave just alerted me that my burrito is ready to eat. Sentry’s new Metric Alerts is the microwave to the frozen burrito that is your code.