Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

July 2020

AppSignal Now Supports Redis for Node.js Out of the Box

Starting today with version 0.6.0 of the Node.js integration, instrumenting a Node.js app that uses Redis is much easier. In fact, we instrument it for you - meaning that if you use Redis in your own app, there’s no extra work for you, everything Just Works™ out of the box! 🎉

The State of Elixir HTTP Clients

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!

Node.js Resiliency Concepts: The Circuit Breaker

In 2009 Node.js opened up a door for front-end developers to dip their toes into the world of servers without having to leave the comfort of their language. It’s almost effortless to get started with Node. You can basically copy-paste an entire HTTP server into existence and then install an ODM and you’ve got your CRUD app ready to roll! However, if we’ve learned anything from the amazing Spider-Man, it’s that with great power, comes great responsibility.

Scaling Queue Workers Efficiently with AppSignal Metrics

Most web apps can benefit from a background queue, often used to process error-prone or time-consuming side jobs. These background jobs can vary from sending emails, to updating caches, to performing core business logic. As any background queueing system scales the number of jobs it needs to process, the pool of workers processing those jobs needs to scale as well.

How AppSignal Monitors Their Own Kafka Brokers

Today, we dip our toes into collecting custom metrics with a standalone agent. We’ll be taking our own Kafka brokers and using the StatsD protocol to get the metrics into AppSignal. This post is for those with some experience in using monitoring tools, and who want to take monitoring to every corner of their architecture, or want to add their own metrics to their monitoring setup.

A Deep Dive Into V8

A majority of front-end developers deal with this buzzword all the time: V8. A big part of its popularity is due to the fact that it led JavaScript to a new level of performance. Yes, V8 is very fast. But, how does it perform its magic and why is it so responsive? The official docs state that “V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, written in C++. It is used in Chrome and Node.js, among others”.