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Last updated: May 2026 Elixir applications have performance characteristics that are genuinely different from Ruby or Python. The BEAM virtual machine handles concurrency through lightweight processes, supervision trees restart failed processes automatically, and Phoenix channels can hold tens of thousands of persistent connections on a single node. These are strengths, but they also mean that the performance problems you encounter are different from what most APM tools were built to detect.

Elixir’s “let it crash” philosophy is one of the best ideas in modern software design. Supervisors restart failed processes, the system self-heals, and life goes on. It’s like having a really good immune system. The problem is that a really good immune system can also hide chronic conditions. A GenServer crashing and restarting is working as designed.

Erlang's Observer is often discussed in passing and regarded as a curiosity during Elixir courses. However, Observer provides many powerful tools for monitoring and debugging your application, both in development and production. Together, we will learn how to access the Observer GUI and debug a project that leaks memory, both locally and through a remote node. We will set up process tracing and track garbage collections to find the offending code in our sample project. Let's get started!

In part one of this series, we learned how to implement batch updates and advanced inserts in Ecto to dramatically improve database performance. But implementing these optimizations is only the first step. Ensuring they continue to work effectively in production requires professional monitoring and observability. This guide will show you how to use AppSignal for Elixir to monitor your Ecto application's performance when dealing with batch data operations.

GraphQL provides a powerful approach to building APIs, and Absinthe is the leading GraphQL implementation for Elixir applications. While GraphQL offers many benefits, it can introduce a set of errors and performance bottlenecks that might be challenging to track and debug. In this article, you’ll learn how to use AppSignal to monitor, debug, and resolve errors in your Absinthe-based GraphQL API.

Background task processing is something that many developers may encounter when building Elixir applications. This might include sending emails asynchronously, posting and fetching data from an API, and more. Oban, a powerful and persistent job processing library, offers a reliable way to handle background tasks, scheduled operations, and more. However, like any complex system, Oban requires careful monitoring to ensure its smooth operation, identify bottlenecks, and prevent unexpected failures.

Database performance can make or break your Elixir application. While Ecto provides a powerful toolkit for database interactions, understanding how these operations perform in production is critical. Whether you're dealing with slow queries, connection pool issues, or mysterious N+1 problems, the ability to effectively monitor and optimize your database operations can be the difference between a sluggish application and one that delights your users.

Hey Elixir friends, great news! Honeybadger now offers performance monitoring for your Elixir, Phoenix, and Oban applications. Last year, we launched Honeybadger Insights, a new logging and performance monitoring tool bundled with Honeybadger. Insights allows you to query your logs and events to diagnose performance issues, perform root-cause analyses, and create charts and dashboards to see what's happening in real time.

Absinthe is a popular GraphQL toolkit for building robust APIs in Elixir. Monitoring such APIs is essential to ensure performance, detect bottlenecks, and handle errors effectively. AppSignal offers a seamless way to monitor and gain insights into your Absinthe-powered GraphQL APIs, enabling you to keep applications performant and reliable.

Learn how to integrate OpenTelemetry with Elixir to monitor and troubleshoot your applications with traces, metrics, and logs.