In the first of this two-part series, we covered how to set up AppSignal in a Ruby on Rails application for many great insights out of the box. AppSignal can automatically track errors, monitor performance, and report metrics about some dependencies. But, in many cases, each of our applications behaves in different ways, so we'll want more than just generic monitoring. In this post, we will run through adding custom instrumentation and monitoring to a Ruby on Rails application.

This case study showcases La langue française, an online learning platform and publication that teaches people how to speak French. La langue française hosts their Ruby on Rails application on Vultr with the help of Cloud 66.

Monitoring an application’s performance is the basics of building a successful software product. With the popularity that Rails has always been riding on in the start-up world, it makes all the more sense to look for tools that help you keep your Ruby on Rails application in shape. In this guide, we will look at some of the top APM tools for Rails applications and compare them along some standard benchmarks to help you get an insight into which tool fits your use case the best.

There are many ways to add search functionality to a Rails application. While many Rails developers choose to use the native search functionality built into popular databases like MySQL and Postgres, others need more flexible or feature rich search functionality. ElasticSearch is probably the most well known option available but it has its own issues. Firstly, it is a resource hungry beast. To run ElasticSearch properly in production, you need a few beefy servers.

Rails is a classic on Ruby for a reason. The framework is powerful, intuitive and the language has a low entry bar. However, being designed when systems existed on a single server, standard Rails logging is excessively fractionalized. Even on a single server, a straightforward call can quickly turn into seven unique, unconnected logs.

Today I want to show you how to build a polymorphic select box in Ruby on Rails. Seems trivial, but it’s not. Let me show you the way and save you some time.

Logging is useful in building, managing and debugging Rails applications. Most logging functionalities are built into the application, and it is fairly simple to find the logs. However, as your applications scale up in volume, it becomes difficult to trace the source of an issue. That’s when you want to implement a cloud based log management system to get a unified view of all logs from your Rails application.

Hot on the trail of our Rollout Strategies release, we are very excited to release another major feature for our Rails users: Preview Deployments Many of us use Continuous Integration (CI) to automatically test our code with every git commit. Preview Deployments adds support for Continuous Deployments (CD) to all Rails applications deployed with Cloud 66.

Today we are rolling out a major new feature for all our Rails applications: support for Blue / Green deployments and Canary Releases. This is the most significant feature we've released since Rolling and Parallel Deployment Strategies were released last year, and we're very excited to help our customers deploy their applications more confidently.

Lambda is an excellent option for deploying lower-traffic web services when you don't want to maintain another server and you want easy access to all of AWS's other services. In this article, Godwin Ekuma shows us step-by-step how to deploy our Rails apps to AWS Lambda.