If you’ve ever used Ruby on Rails, you’ve probably come across the concept of concerns. Whenever you jumpstart a new Rails project, you get a directory app/controllers/concerns and app/models/concerns. But what are concerns? And why do people from the Rails community sometimes talk badly about them?

AppSignal now supports the next API version of PagerDuty. 🎉 One of our devs was on support rotation the other day, and a customer asked whether we could add support for the next API version of PagerDuty. We won’t tell you who it was, but this developer typically answers questions by solving things as quickly as he can. So, two days later, boom! The improved integration for Pagerduty went live.

In an ideal world where we reached 100% test coverage, our error handling was flawless, and all our failures were handled gracefully — in a world where all our systems reached perfection, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Yet, here we are. Earth, 2020. By the time you read this sentence, somebody’s server failed in production. A moment of silence for the processes we lost.

For many freelancers and small business owners, moving from consulting or freelance development work to operating a SaaS product is the Holy Grail. That makes sense: running a SaaS scales better and makes for a stable income. While there’s no guaranteed path to success, here’s what we learned taking AppSignal from a “20% time side-project” to a business serving thousands of developers around the globe. This article isn’t a blueprint.

In this article, I’ll try to guide you through some examples and definitions that aim to clarify the Web Vitals landscape from a Next.js perspective. Let’s dive in!

Today, we hope to make testing Absinthe a bit easier for you. We believe that it’s a great library for writing GraphQL applications, but if you previously haven’t done much work on an Absinthe application, you might find some things a bit tricky to test.

Last week, we had an issue with one of our Kafka brokers. Don’t worry, it didn’t impact any customers. When monitoring things closely, you can often solve things before they impact a customer ;-). In today’s post, I’ll show you how we use AppSignal to dogfood our own issues. I’ll go through how we monitor the non-Ruby part of our stack and how we used AppSignal to detect and resolve the issue.

Because a lot of systems are connected to the web these days (or, at least, communicate/integrate with it at some level), companies are giving more and more attention to web security. Web security usually comes to public attention when certain events reach the news, for example, security leakages, hacker activities, and/or data-stealing over big companies, some of them really large (like Google, LinkedIn, etc.).

We just released Ruby Gem 2.11. We are always making things easier to use for you, so more things work out of the box and more instrumentation and dashboarding is built without you doing any heavy lifting. This release has a big overhaul of Active Job support. The cherry on the stroopwafel cake is the automatically generated dashboard with status per queue, queue throughput and queue times. 2.11 also polishes a lot of other integrations. Let’s dive in.

We’re happy to announce a new version of AppSignal for Node.js, and support for instrumenting Apollo Server v2+. This means that we’ll save you more some time, and perform more automatic instrumentation for you.