Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AppSignal Intelligence Just Got More Rails Context

Today we’re taking our partnership with Chris Oliver (founder of Hatchbox and GoRails) one step further. With AppSignal, you can already store enriched telemetry about your applications, services, and infrastructure, along with your user context, in your AppSignal context store. You can use that context store for traditional observability reporting and workflows, or connect it to your agents over MCP or the CLI. AppSignal’s context store is what our Intelligence features are built on.

Laravel vs. Ruby on Rails

Laravel and Ruby on Rails are both full-stack, batteries-included MVC frameworks with an ORM, a templating engine, a CLI, and a shared philosophy: going from an empty folder to a working app shouldn't take fifty decisions first. Laravel wins when your team already lives in PHP, or when you want the largest possible pool of developers, packages (code other people have already written for common tasks), and hosting options to choose from.

Finding the Slow Query Killing Your Rails App

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.

Best Error Monitoring for Rails in 2026

You deploy on Friday. Sidekiq starts failing on a job that worked fine in staging. Your error tool shows you a NoMethodError on line 47. But it doesn’t tell you that the job only fails when processing records created after the migration you ran on Thursday. The stack trace is correct and completely useless at the same time. This is the core problem with general-purpose error monitoring on Rails apps. Rails teams deal with N+1 queries that cascade into timeout errors.

What Architecture Ensures Long-Term Scalability in a Rails-Based B2B Platform?

Scalability is not a feature you add later; it is a choice made at the architectural level from day one. A Rails-based B2B platform that handles growing clients, data, and transactions without slowdowns or costly rewrites is built on a modular design, clear domain boundaries, background job processing, caching, and a database strategy that supports load distribution and horizontal scale. Get these foundations right, and you stay in control of growth instead of reacting to problems after they appear.

Setting Up Server Monitoring for a Rails App on Hatchbox

Owning your server stack shouldn't be a source of anxiety. Unfortunately, it often is, especially if you only pay attention to the problems you can feel in your gut: Is the app running? Is it throwing exceptions? Does it seem fast enough? These are great intuitive measurements, but just as a doctor uses diagnostics to catch high blood pressure before it becomes a crisis, you need deeper visibility to detect memory leaks, CPU spikes, and disk consumption before they bring your project to a halt.

N+1 Queries in Rails: A Guide to Detection and Prevention

N+1 queries are the most common performance problem in Rails applications. ActiveRecord’s lazy loading means every belongs_to, has_many, and has_one association is a potential N+1 waiting to happen. The good news is that Rails gives you multiple ways to fix them, and tools like Scout can find them automatically. This guide covers everything a Rails developer needs to know about N+1 queries: what they are, how to fix them, how to prevent them in CI, and how to detect them in production.

AppSignal x Hatchbox: Affordable Hosting, Full Visibility

Affordable hosting has always been a puzzle. Heroku made deploying Rails apps simple, but with Salesforce at the helm, active development has stalled. Many developers are left wondering what comes next, locked into a platform that is no longer moving forward. Chris, the founder of GoRails, felt that same frustration. That is why he built Hatchbox. Hatchbox handles your deployments, runs on servers you own, and keeps costs predictable. No dyno management, no add-on sprawl.

Best Rails APM Tools in 2026: A Developer's Guide

Rails applications have a specific set of performance challenges that make monitoring genuinely useful rather than just box-checking. ActiveRecord is convenient to use and also convenient to accidentally write N+1 queries with. Memory bloat in long-running processes, particularly when Sidekiq or Action Cable is involved, is a recurring production problem for a lot of teams. Background job performance tends to degrade quietly until it becomes noticeable.