Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AppSignal

Monitoring Any System with StatsD and AppSignal's Standalone Agent

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.

The Diagnose: How Support Works at AppSignal

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.

Improved Pagerduty Integration with Detailed Alerts

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.

Node.js Resiliency Concepts: Recovery and Self-Healing

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.

Going from Consulting to SaaS

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.

Identifying and Resolving a Kafka Issue With AppSignal

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.

Security Best Practices for Node.js

Because a lot of systems are connected to the web these days (or, at least, communicate/integrate with it at some level), companies are giving more and more attention to web security. Web security usually comes to public attention when certain events reach the news, for example, security leakages, hacker activities, and/or data-stealing over big companies, some of them really large (like Google, LinkedIn, etc.).