The Django ORM makes it easy to fetch data, but there's a downside: it's easy to write inefficient queries as the number of records in your database grows. One area where the ease of writing queries can bite is you is with N+1 queries. Expensive N+1 queries go undiscovered in small development databases. Finding expensive N+1 queries is an area where Scout is particularly helpful.

Browser development tools - like Chrome Dev Tools - are vital for debugging client-side performance issues. However, server-side performance metrics have been outside the browser's reach. That changes with the Server Timing API. Supported by Chrome 65+, Firefox 59+, and more browsers, the Server Timing API defines a spec that enables a server to communicate performance metrics about the request-response cycle to the user agent.

When New Relic launched ten years ago, web applications had a tendency to fail hard and in more obvious ways. Today, it's easier to build resilient apps, but they fail in more complex, unique, and subtle ways. These issues are time-consuming to track down. While several niche New Relic alternatives have appeared, they've focused on a lighter feature set versus solving these increasingly hard performance problems.