When it comes to monitoring your Elixir application, it's challenging to make sense of the many metrics and statistics that you can read from the internals of the Erlang virtual machine. In this post, we'll be looking at the scheduler utilization metric in order to understand what it is, why we should monitor it, and how to monitor it.

In this post, we’ll show you what atoms are in Elixir, why you should monitor them, and how to do so with AppSignal. Let’s prevent your app from crashing with a pop up of an error such as.

In this post, we’ll do a quick overview of monitoring memory issues in Erlang and Elixir setups. We’ll do so by monitoring memory usage at three levels: Host, OS, and within the Erlang VM.

I have been using Grafana for almost four years now, and in that time it has become my go-to tool for my application observability needs. Especially now that Grafana allows you to also view logs and traces, you can easily have all three pillars of observability surfaced through Grafana. As a result, when I started working on the Elixir PromEx library, having Grafana be the end target for the metrics dashboards made perfect sense.

We’re happy to announce the release of AppSignal for Elixir 2.1.0. 🥳 In this version, we’ve made our error helpers more flexible than before. You could already send Elixir exceptions directly through AppSignal and now you can add extra metadata to errors when using send_error/2-4. Let’s go through all of the changes 😀

In order to be the best 5-in-1 APM tool for Elixir, we’re constantly working on improving how AppSignal works and integrates with your app. With AppSignal by your side, you’ll have a clear overview of your app’s performance after an installation process that we keep fast and simple. As a first APM for Elixir out there, we’ve always focused on doing all the heavy lifting and providing Elixir developers with a service we’d love to use ourselves.

Logs are an important part of your application and logging shouldn’t be one of the last things you think of. You should configure your log system, formatter, and style as soon as you start the development of your app. Also, do your best to document the process and share how it works with the rest of your team. In this article, we’re going to demonstrate how logs work in Elixir. We’ll jump into Elixir’s Logger module, which brings a lot of power to logging features.

In today’s post, we’ll look at two Elixir HTTP client libraries: Mint and Finch. Finch is built on top of Mint. We’ll see the benefits offered by this abstraction layer. We’ll also talk about some of the existing HTTP client libraries in the ecosystem and discuss some of the things that make Mint and Finch different. Finally, we’ll put together a quick project that makes use of Finch to put all of our learning into action. Let’s jump right in!

Erlang & Elixir are ready for asynchronous work right off the bat. Generally speaking, background job systems aren’t needed as much as in other ecosystems but they still have their place for particular use cases. This post goes through a few best practices I often try to think of in advance when writing background jobs, so that I don’t hit some of the pain points that have hurt me multiple times in the past.

With a special thanks to Aleksandar and Unai, we’re happy to announce AppSignal for Elixir 1.13.0, which includes our all-new LiveView instrumentation helpers and updated typespecs. If you’re not an AppSignal user yet, make sure to check out the product tour and see how errors, performance, host metrics and triggers all come together in one tool.