Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A lot of what's useful in a high-volume log source is a count, a rate, or a measurement — 5xx responses per minute, p95 request duration, job retry rate. You don't need every line to track those. You need the metric. Log-based metrics is now in beta as part of AppSignal Labs.

Over the last decade, a great deal of data privacy regulations have been passed in the European Union. Like it or not, measures like GDPR, the Digital Services Act, and the upcoming Artificial Intelligence Act are exerting increasing influence across industries over how and especially where the data of European customers is stored. In this article, we will explore the ways to keep the simplicity of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) while utilizing only European providers.

We've been shipping faster. A dark mode for the UI, AppSignal MCP, the AWS dashboard templates — things we would have kept internal a year ago until everything was polished. Now we don't. A v1 in your hands beats a v3 in our heads. We learn more from a week of real use than from a quarter of internal review. So we're giving that work a home. AppSignal Labs is where you'll find the earlier versions. Real software, available today, with a direct line to the team building it.

More and more developers are choosing self-hosting over traditional PaaS. At first, self-hosting may seem like unnecessary heavy lifting, especially when you can deploy as fast as creating a repo. However, with correct tooling, it’s easy to see why devs are moving away from PaaS. You get dedicated resources and (if needed) a European data center at a fraction of the cost.

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.

When my Sidekiq job starts failing or slowing down, I often feel frustrated, especially if I don’t know how to fix it. If you’re using Sidekiq to run your background jobs, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a vital element of your stack, handling everything from data exports to password reset requests. It runs silently in the background, and most of the time, you’re not even giving it a second thought.

Documentation search is often the last thing devs think about, until someone posts publicly that they couldn't find a basic answer, or your support queue fills up with things that are genuinely in the docs. We decided to get ahead of that. This is the story of how we went from a minimal keyword-only search on our docs to a conversational Ask AI experience.

In the wake of 2010s, PaaS felt like magic. You focused on the code, and the platform did the rest. You could ship a production app without knowing anything about networking or, heck, even what a load balancer is. Heroku in particular made deployment a lost thought, especially for early-stage companies. That era is somewhat over, not because platforms got worse overnight, but because the assumptions underneath them quietly stopped being true.

Most of us run multiple virtual private servers (VPS) at a time. That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on the CPU usage and memory. However, since this step often slips our minds, there is room for automated monitoring. Open-source tools tend to be a default choice, and for a good reason. The problem is that they don't provide everything you need for monitoring in a single place. As a result, you may find yourself writing custom shell scripts for automation.

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.