Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Prometheus is a battle-tested, flexible and, most importantly, free tool that has long been the go-to open-source monitoring solution. Much of its popularity came down to its simplicity. A few years have gone by, though, and the APM space has gotten pretty crowded. Developers are now starting to move away from the complexity of self-hosting, and OpenTelemetry stands out as one of the CNCF’s fastest-expanding projects. In fact, it’s now among the most adopted telemetry frameworks out there.

Performance problems in Rails applications are sneaky. Generally speaking, nobody opens tickets that say “my application is slower than it was last month (about 20%)”. What you do get instead are vague complaints from team members about a p95 latency that is climbing every week or a background job that used to take 2 seconds now taking 40 seconds to finish.

You open a monitoring tool, and the data is all there: errors, traces, anomalies, incidents, and countless intricacies. If you want to get the right slice of that data, you need to know exactly which dashboard to open and what filters to apply. But when the poor UI gets in the way, this can take longer than it should. Luckily, this is not the case with AppSignal. MCP (Model Context Protocol) changes the interface entirely.