For Phoenix developers, maintaining the health of your applications is critical. AppSignal offers a powerful solution to gain deep insights into your application's performance and stability. In this introductory guide, we'll walk through the process of setting up AppSignal in your Phoenix app, instrumenting your code for detailed monitoring, handling errors effectively, and utilizing AppSignal's features to maintain and improve your application's performance.

In the first part of this series, we saw that even if you just use AppSignal’s default application monitoring, you can get a lot of information about how your Phoenix application is running. Even so, there are many ways in which a Phoenix application may exhibit performance issues, such as slow database queries, poorly engineered LiveView components, views that are too heavy, or non-optimized assets.

AppSignal is a powerful error tracking and performance monitoring tool that can help you maintain reliability and speed in your Elixir applications. In this tutorial, the first of a two-part series, you'll learn how to integrate AppSignal into your Elixir application, configure it for error tracking, interpret error reports, and leverage AppSignal's features to debug and resolve issues.

When relying on data from external services, it's important for the retrieval to be accurate and timely. While we may not control how efficiently an external API responds to our requests, we can control how and when we request data from that API. However, over time as your application and the API that serves it change, once efficient requests may turn into bottlenecks.

While a GraphQL API may be less susceptible to the common REST API performance issues of under and over-fetching data, allowing users to request and receive a wide range of data in a single, nestable query can also come with performance risks. AppSignal for Elixir now supports Absinthe out of the box, and automatically adds Absinthe spans to your app's metrics. AppSignal also automatically instruments Ecto, giving you insights into your application's queries.

If you're using Oban for managing background jobs in your Elixir application and want to gain a deeper data-driven understanding of how they perform, you've come to the right place. AppSignal for Elixir now automatically instruments Oban, meaning you can now monitor the performance of your background jobs through an AppSignal Magic Dashboard, which gives you detailed information on queue times, processing times, and notifies you of any exceptions.

AppSignal for Elixir now provides out-of-the-box support for Finch. If your Elixir app sends requests to another web app, you're likely already using Finch. We wanted to ensure that AppSignal's analytics provided performance data on a per-request level.

We're very excited to release AppSignal for Phoenix 2.1, which adds automatic instrumentation for LiveView through Telemetry. You can now receive performance and error insights for your LiveView, without manually instrumenting each of its methods.

OpenTelemetry can be used to instrument your Elixir applications to generate telemetry data. The telemetry data can then be visualized using an observability tool to monitor your Elixir application performance. In this tutorial, we will use OpenTelemetry Elixir libraries to instrument an Elixir application and then visualize it using SigNoz. Somewhere during the lifetime of an application, it's inevitable that it will have some performance issues.