Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

July 2018

Monitoring Django apps on Heroku

I don't know of an easier way to deploy a Django app than letting Heroku do the work. That said, how do you stay on top of your app's performance, errors, and stability post-launch? Running an app on Heroku is a blissful experience, but it presents some monitoring challenges that aren't present when you control the hardware. In this post, I'll walk through a free-to-start, low-effort approach that gives you great visibility of the health of your Django app on Heroku.

Part I: How not to structure your database-backed web apps

Most scientific papers are unlikely to change your day-to-day approach as a Rails web developer. How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild Yang et al., ICSE’18 is the exception to that rule. This study examined 12 popular, mature, opensource Rails apps for ActiveRecord performance anti-patterns. And boy, did they find some issues.