Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This past week some of the Scout team had the opportunity to hang out at PyCon USA in Cleveland. This was the first time the Scout APM team had attended PyCon. It was great to spend some time with an awesome swath of the Python community. With a great booth location situated across the aisle from the innovative and fun Slack booth, we had fun getting to know everyone with a solid amount of traffic heading past our booth over the exhibition days.

The 2019 edition of PyCon USA takes place over the next few days in Cleveland, Ohio. Scout is delighted to be there, sharing our APM tool with the Python community. Plus, we'll have great t-shirts and stickers for you, and we love to get geeky - one of our lead product engineers, plus two of our smart support engineers, are working the booth, ready to help you figure out your Python performance problems.

I'm an engineer by trade. I rely on intuition when investigating a slow Django app. I've solved a lot of performance issues over the years and the short cuts my brain takes often work. However, intuition can fail. It can fail hard in complex Django apps with many layers (ex: an SQL database, a NoSQL database, ElasticSearch, etc) and many views. There's too much noise.

Forecasting traffic to your web app is important for capacity planning, but generating a seasonally accurate model of your traffic is pretty daunting.

Using the right Ruby interpreter to run your programs can make all the difference. Unfortunately, it can be tough to find resources about different Ruby interpreter options, or about how to choose the right one.

Interested in Learning the Elixir language? Join us in this entertaining Elixir tutorial and overview. This post will spin a yarn about an ambitious wizard, Alatar, and his quest to revamp a magic web storefront using Elxir. We will observe Alatar decide on Elixir as his development platform, and follow him on the journey of learning and implementation. Along the way, he will utilize several frameworks written for Elixir (including Phoenix, Ecto, and Poison).

We've had sparkline charts of response time for a long time on our Endpoints tab, and now have extended them to the throughput column as well. Quickly isolate endpoints that are spiking with traffic, and drill down into them to diagnose. No need to hunt to see what's causing an unusual trend in traffic.

As reported on Issue #228, if scout_apm is disabled on a node via the configuration monitor = false, we don't intend to install any instruments, but a few snuck in anyway. Since the rest of the agent isn't running, they (slowly but steadily) built up recorded info, but didn't purge it, causing a slow memory leak that became clear over the course of a week or two. We've stopped the offending instruments from installing themselves when Scout is disabled.

Recently the Ecto library released a major update - Version 3.0. As part of the changes, some of the hooks that Scout relied on to capture data have changed. No longer can we hook into Ecto's logging system to extract information about queries being run, and instead we have a proper Telemetry event to listen to.