Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Last week, we were busy at AppSignal with our first-ever Launch Week and Rails World 2025! In case you missed it or spent the time snacking on our stroopwafels in Amsterdam, here's a quick recap of what we launched, and what that means for your monitoring setup!

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.

Fastify stands out among Node.js web frameworks for its obsessive focus on performance and boasts impressive benchmarks, with throughput often 2-3x higher than Express and other popular alternatives. But here's the paradox: without proper visibility, even applications with a good foundation will degrade over time as you add features and complexity.

We're excited to officially launch our OpenTelemetry instrumentation. AppSignal is now able to expand our observability to a dozen popular languages, frameworks, and tools, giving customers the deep insights they need to monitor their entire stack. In this article, we'll show you how you can use AppSignal and OpenTelemetry to proactively monitor your app.

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.

Over time, web applications have evolved from simple request/response-based systems into complex, distributed ones with lots of moving parts. If something goes wrong (and you can be sure it will), finding the cause can be nearly impossible. But this need not be the case: enter tracing. Tracing refers to the process of collecting detailed information about the execution of requests within an application, including function calls, execution time, and other relevant data.

In this guide, we'll harness AppSignal to detect, diagnose, and remove performance bottlenecks and employ proper tracing in a Ruby on Rails application. From setting up tracing to capturing errors and logging, we’ve got you covered. We'll ensure our application runs smoother than ever, even under the heaviest loads! But first, let's quickly touch on how to define tracing and its benefits.

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.

In August 2012, we set out to build a fairly priced, developer-centric APM and logging platform that we’d love to use ourselves. Soon after, AppSignal was born and quickly gained traction. Despite operating in a competitive market, we’ve become a household name among many of our peers, now serving over 2,000 organizations across six continents.

Silent failures — like missed cron jobs, database crashes, or backup issues — can cause real damage if they go unnoticed. Traditional monitoring often focuses on requests and server metrics but misses crucial background processes. This creates a significant monitoring blind spot where critical elements of your application can fail without immediate detection. To help eliminate this blind spot, we've introduced AppSignal Wrap.