Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Prometheus is a battle-tested, flexible and, most importantly, free tool that has long been the go-to open-source monitoring solution. Much of its popularity came down to its simplicity. A few years have gone by, though, and the APM space has gotten pretty crowded. Developers are now starting to move away from the complexity of self-hosting, and OpenTelemetry stands out as one of the CNCF’s fastest-expanding projects. In fact, it’s now among the most adopted telemetry frameworks out there.

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.

You open a monitoring tool, and the data is all there: errors, traces, anomalies, incidents, and countless intricacies. If you want to get the right slice of that data, you need to know exactly which dashboard to open and what filters to apply. But when the poor UI gets in the way, this can take longer than it should. Luckily, this is not the case with AppSignal. MCP (Model Context Protocol) changes the interface entirely.

AppSignal now supports Render's Metrics Stream. Configure it once in your Render workspace and Render forwards OpenTelemetry metrics to the AppSignal Collector. From there, the metrics show up in your AppSignal app as host metrics and automated dashboards. You only have to set up the stream once per workspace.

AWS delivers CloudWatch metrics in OpenTelemetry format via Firehose, but AppSignal uses its own internal format. Building the parser to bridge these two formats presented several technical challenges. The metrics arriving through this pipe power AWS automated dashboards. When AppSignal detects metrics from a supported AWS service, it creates a dashboard for it automatically, with pre-built charts grouped by category: compute, databases, networking, messaging, storage, and others.

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.