Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Congratulations! Your Rails app has finally started seeing consistent traffic and things are on the upswing. But with growth comes the potential for the sluggish sort of SQL queries that can really slow things down. In this post, we’ll go over what your database (whether it’s MySQL or PostgreSQL) can tell you about the problem, and we’ll also talk about what it can’t tell you. Spoiler alert: this is where Scout comes galloping over the hillside to the rescue!

‍ Let’s talk about something we’ve all experienced: a customer reports that their checkout process is “sometimes slow,” – or maybe you noticed an unexpected spike in response times. So, you dive into the logs, grep through thousands of lines, and try to match timestamps with your APM traces. Sound familiar? At Scout, we’ve seen countless engineering teams struggle with this disconnect between their logging and APM tools.

‍ While Scout provides powerful monitoring tools (try it now!) mastering logging is an awesome complement to these skills. In this post, we’ll see how to create readable, actionable logs for both humans and machines. You’ll improve your logging strategy, drastically reduce troubleshooting time, and put yourself in the best possible position for maximum observability. As a starting example, let’s take this error log.

Proponents of microservices claim more development velocity and reliability; more comprehensive test and vertical or horizontal scale with a container orchestrator; tons of flexibility around tool choice. They’re not wrong: When you build with a microservices architecture, you’re likely going to see cost improvements early in your software development life cycle (SDLC), driven mostly by the decoupling of services.

Slow code is everywhere—or maybe "anywhere. "Slowness" is a spectrum. Sometimes, you triumphantly move performance bottlenecks so that the bar for "slow" always gets lower. In our experience, though, things often trend in the other direction.

Additionally, We didn’t need to make any changes to our infrastructure, except for adding the certificate and keys to the entities originating the requests from our private subnets. See below for troubleshooting techniques which can be useful when setting up mTLS..

Django is one of the most popular web frameworks for building applications. Its elegance and flexibility make it a favorite among developers, enabling them to craft intricate applications with ease. However, as applications grow in complexity and user traffic grows, the need for active performance monitoring becomes imperative.

A Rails profiler is a tool used to analyze the performance of your Ruby on Rails application. It helps identify bottlenecks, memory leaks, and other performance issues, allowing you to optimize your code and improve overall web application speed. Profilers are essential in ensuring your web application runs smoothly and delivers a better user experience.

Valued customers, friends, and Scout APM users: Our goal has always been to provide you with the peace of mind of knowing your systems are healthy and serving your customers as expected. While security has always been paramount to us, we’ve recently made it official. We are thrilled to share with you a recent significant achievement for our team and those who trust us with their data. After many months of hard work, we have obtained our SOC 2 certification!

OpenTelemetry is enabling a revolution in how Observability data is collected and transmitted. See our What Is OpenTelemetry post on why this is an important inflection point in the Observability space. In this post, we’ll walk through how to configure the OpenTelemetry Gems within a Rails app.