We love Scout at Rollbar. Here's how we use it.

Zero configuration monitoring for new hosts

We have added Scout to our Ansible configuration for new host setup. So, when we provision a new machine, we get basic monitoring without any extra configuration. Once the host is up and running, we add it to the appropriate role in Scout and all of our monitoring plugins are magically deployed and enabled on the new host.

Monitoring HTTP response codes

One of the best things about Scout is how beautiful and therefore usable their graphs are. We have a Scout dashboard which shows all of our response codes which allows us to quickly see connections between different hosts when problems occur.

Custom plugins!

Scout's plugin model makes it really easy to extend. We have implemented our own log monitoring plugin which reports metrics like the 90th percentile of slow queries on our site. These types of plugins allow us to see issues at a glance during deploys, maintenance and load spikes.

Slowly taking over Nagios

Nagios is amazing, but let's be real... Anyone who has used it knows how painful it is to set up, administer and extend. We are in the process of cutting over from Nagios to Scout to handle more of our infrastructure monitoring and soon, alerting.