Have you ever heard of Node.js async hooks module? If the answer is no, then you should get familiar with it. Even though it’s new stuff (released along with Node.js 9) and the module is still in experimental mode, which means it’s not recommended for production, you should still get to know it a bit better. In short, Node.js async hooks, more specifically the async_hooks module, provides a clear and easy-to-use API to track async resources in Node.js.
Application monitoring alone is not always enough to get the full picture of your systems. Frequently, services running in satellite apps (or supporting apps) can have an acute impact on your day-to-day operations. Database servers are well-known examples of this. Backup scripts and other background jobs can also slow systems and are often overlooked. AppSignal does not watch these satellite processes by default.
Setting up AppSignal isn’t as complex as rocket science. Developer experience is really important to us, as AppSignal started as a way to scratch our itch. We also put a lot of effort in providing you with a first-class developer support. In fact, our developers are the ones answering all of your your technical questions. This is why we’ve added a diagnose tool to our Node.js integration.
If you’ve ever used Ruby on Rails, you’ve probably come across the concept of concerns. Whenever you jumpstart a new Rails project, you get a directory app/controllers/concerns and app/models/concerns. But what are concerns? And why do people from the Rails community sometimes talk badly about them?
AppSignal now supports the next API version of PagerDuty. 🎉 One of our devs was on support rotation the other day, and a customer asked whether we could add support for the next API version of PagerDuty. We won’t tell you who it was, but this developer typically answers questions by solving things as quickly as he can. So, two days later, boom! The improved integration for Pagerduty went live.
In an ideal world where we reached 100% test coverage, our error handling was flawless, and all our failures were handled gracefully — in a world where all our systems reached perfection, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Yet, here we are. Earth, 2020. By the time you read this sentence, somebody’s server failed in production. A moment of silence for the processes we lost.
For many freelancers and small business owners, moving from consulting or freelance development work to operating a SaaS product is the Holy Grail. That makes sense: running a SaaS scales better and makes for a stable income. While there’s no guaranteed path to success, here’s what we learned taking AppSignal from a “20% time side-project” to a business serving thousands of developers around the globe. This article isn’t a blueprint.
In this article, I’ll try to guide you through some examples and definitions that aim to clarify the Web Vitals landscape from a Next.js perspective. Let’s dive in!
Today, we hope to make testing Absinthe a bit easier for you. We believe that it’s a great library for writing GraphQL applications, but if you previously haven’t done much work on an Absinthe application, you might find some things a bit tricky to test.
Last week, we had an issue with one of our Kafka brokers. Don’t worry, it didn’t impact any customers. When monitoring things closely, you can often solve things before they impact a customer ;-). In today’s post, I’ll show you how we use AppSignal to dogfood our own issues. I’ll go through how we monitor the non-Ruby part of our stack and how we used AppSignal to detect and resolve the issue.
