We’re very happy to present you with version 3.0 of AppSignal for Ruby - a new major release for the Ruby gem. 🎉 We have changed the way we instrument apps and gems to provide better compatibility with other instrumentation gems. Support for Ruby version 1.9 has been removed and deprecated classes, modules, methods, and instrumentations have also been removed. Read our upgrade guide! In the rest of the post, we’ll explain what the new version of our gem brings to you and your apps.

ActiveRecord is Ruby on Rails’ most magical feature. We don’t usually need to worry about its inner workings, but when we do, here’s how AppSignal can help us know what’s going on under the hood.

When building a production application, you are usually on the lookout for ways to optimize its performance while keeping any possible trade-offs in mind. In this post, we’ll take a look at an approach that can give you a quick win when it comes to improving the way your Node.js apps handle the workload. An instance of Node.js runs in a single thread which means that on a multi-core system (which most computers are these days), not all cores will be utilized by the app.

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 😀

We just released a Magic Dashboard for Garbage Collection stats for our Node.js integration. If you are leaking memory, this dashboard will help you discover and fix this problem. No setting up is required, this dashboard will magically automatically appear among the rest of your dashboards. ✨

Modules and mixins are, without doubt, great resources that make Ruby so attractive. They give the application the ability to share the code that can be used with ease in other places. It also helps us organize our code by grouping functionalities and concerns, which improves the readability and maintainability of our code. In this article, we will go through the concepts behind modules and mixins.

Microservice architecture is a software design pattern in which we write applications by combining several small programs. These programs, which are called microservices, work together for a common goal. For some teams, it takes a lot less time and effort to write several small applications than a single large one.

Monitoring your application can be a difficult task if you’re just getting started with it. You need to know which metrics matter most and understand which ones you can combine into meaningful graphs. In the (not just holiday ⛄️) spirit of making things smoother for our users, we’ve added a magic dashboard to the Ruby integration that shows you the volume of emails you are sending with ActionMailer.

As we’re doing our best to make monitoring easy, we’ve wanted to make more content that would really show and not just tell you how easy it is to set up monitoring with AppSignal. We’ve been collaborating with Leigh Hallday on making this video for you that will show you everything you need to know about the setup process. We’ll be posting more videos like this on our YouTube channel, so you should subscribe to it if you’d like to get notifications about future videos.

Monitoring for your Node.js apps can be hard. The tricky part is understanding what you need to monitor, instrumenting your code, and then making sense of all the data that’s been emitted. (That’s almost every part you might say 😅 ). At AppSignal, we dogfood our product and understand the pain users feel ourselves. The key points we focus on are the ease of use, flexibility, and developer experience.