Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

For Phoenix developers, maintaining the health of your applications is critical. AppSignal offers a powerful solution to gain deep insights into your application's performance and stability. In this introductory guide, we'll walk through the process of setting up AppSignal in your Phoenix app, instrumenting your code for detailed monitoring, handling errors effectively, and utilizing AppSignal's features to maintain and improve your application's performance.

We've released version 4.0 of the AppSignal gem, which offers significant changes and improvements to our Ruby integration. In this blog post, we'll cover the core updates and explain the steps you need to take before you upgrade.

In the first part of this series, we saw that even if you just use AppSignal’s default application monitoring, you can get a lot of information about how your Phoenix application is running. Even so, there are many ways in which a Phoenix application may exhibit performance issues, such as slow database queries, poorly engineered LiveView components, views that are too heavy, or non-optimized assets.

Most of the time, the default application monitoring metrics, graphs, and visualizations provided by AppSignal will do for your Ruby app. However, you might be the kind of user who likes a bit of control over what is measured, how it’s displayed, and how critical information about your app should be relayed. AppSignal allows you to customize app metrics and dashboards as you wish. In this guide, we’ll learn all about AppSignal's custom metrics, including: And more!

When we observe a slow system, our first instinct might be to label it as failing. This presumption is widespread and highlights a fundamental truth: performance is synonymous with an application's maturity and readiness for production. In web applications, where milliseconds can determine the success or failure of a user interaction, the stakes are incredibly high. Performance is not just a technical benchmark, but a cornerstone of user satisfaction and operational efficiency.

AppSignal's Node.js package now supports monitoring BullMQ jobs. In this article, we'll demonstrate how easy it is to start monitoring BullMQ performance and what insights you can expect to see for your BullMQ jobs in AppSignal.