AppSignal

We wanted to have a tool that has both APM and error monitoring stuff included in one.

I preferred to go to New Relic as the free version offers 100gb storage but have seen some "not good" comments about it compared to Datadog.

My teammates suggested AppSignal.

So which one should be a good option to give a try?

Tech Stach -> Ruby on Rails, Rails-react, Amazon EC2 machine.

Coming from a Ruby background, we've been users of New Relic for quite some time. When we adopted Elixir, the New Relic integration was young and missing essential features, so we gave AppSignal a try. It worked for quite some time, we even implemented a :telemetry reporter for AppSignal . But it was difficult to correlate data in two monitoring solutions, New Relic was undergoing a UI overhaul which made it difficult to use, and AppSignal was missing the flexibility we needed. We had some fans of Datadog, so we gave it a try and it worked out perfectly. Datadog works great with Ruby , Elixir , JavaScript , and has powerful features our engineers love to use (notebooks, dashboards, very flexible alerting). Cherry on top - thanks to the Datadog Terraform provider everything is written as code, allowing us to collaborate on our Datadog setup.

Lawrence：發現繼續賴著用免費的 Scout 也不是辦法，因為目前沒有 N+1 的 tracing 可看，要優化報表 worker 也要有一些 tracing 參考才不會不小心優化過頭（i.e. 全部都很快但很醜的 SQL 重構，但也許其實只需要修掉幾個 N+1 query）。

看了一下各家 APM，已能夠精細追到 N+1 query 的 ruby code stacktrace 除了目前賴著用的 Scout 以外，AppSignal 也是用 request 數算錢，Skylight 更是因為無法設定 billing 上限已經列為拒絕往來戶。

目前找到 New Relic 是用機器數計費比較適合我們，平均 5 dyno 是 $99/mo 而平均 8 dyno 是 $159/mo，相較於前者們都便宜很多，Samuel 如果沒有什麼 concern 我就開一下 14 day trial 囉～？或是如果有人知道其他我漏掉的 APM 也歡迎提供～。

雖然 UI 跟舊版 Google Analytics 有得比（？），但 Rails 相關指標看起來比 Scout 還細，以後 tune performance 應該會很有幫助。

We use AppSignal because it provided us an easy setup, detailed monitoring at an affordable cost with excellent technical support from their team.

Regarding Continuous Integration - we've started with something very easy to set up - CircleCI , but with time we're adding more & more complex pipelines - we use Jenkins to configure & run those. It's much more effort, but at some point we had to pay for the flexibility we expected. Our source code version control is Git (which probably doesn't require a rationale these days) and we keep repos in GitHub - since the very beginning & we never considered moving out. Our primary monitoring these days is in New Relic (Ruby & SPA apps) and AppSignal (Elixir apps) - we're considering unifying it in New Relic , but this will require some improvements in Elixir app observability. For error reporting we use Sentry (a very popular choice in this class) & we collect our distributed logs using Logentries (to avoid semi-manual handling here).

Another major decision was to adopt Elixir and Phoenix Framework - the DX (Developer eXperience) is pretty similar to what we know from RoR, but this tech is running on the top of rock-solid Erlang platform which is powering planet-scale telecom solutions for 20+ years. So we're getting pretty much the best from both worlds: minimum friction & smart conventions that eliminate the excessive boilerplate AND highly concurrent EVM (Erlang's Virtual Machine) that makes all the scalability problems vanish. The transition was very smooth - none of Ruby developers we had decided to leave because of Elixir. What is more, we kept recruiting Ruby developers w/o any requirement regarding Elixir proficiency & we still were able to educate them internally in almost no time. Obviously Elixir comes with some more tools in the stack: Credo , Hex , AppSignal (required to properly monitor BEAM apps).