Best Rails APM Tools in 2026: A Developer's Guide
A look at APM tools for Ruby on Rails as of March 2026.
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Performance
Scout vs Datadog: Developer-Focused Monitoring vs Enterprise Observability
A comparison of Scout and Datadog, with a look at each platform's strengths and feature coverage.
Scout vs Sentry: Comparing Integrated Monitoring Approaches
Scout and Sentry both handle error monitoring and performance, but they started from different places, which shapes what each does well. If you are evaluating both, the origin story is worth understanding because it explains most of the differences you will run into.
Best Python APM Tools in 2026: A Developer's Guide
A review of the state of APM tools for Python in 2026.
Scout vs AppSignal: A Tale of Two Developer-Friendly Choices
A comparison of how Scout and AppSignal each approach application monitoring.
Application Monitoring 101: Queue Time Can Alert Before a Breakdown
Regular monitoring practices can emphasize application response time, but queue time is also often an early and important warning sign. If it rises, you’ll quickly see downstream effects: tail latency, timeouts, and error spikes. This means that this metric can give you a head start tackling app issues before they become user problems. In this post, we’ll discuss queue time, how things can go off track, and practical steps to turn it around.
Application Monitoring 101: Decoding Throughput: Understanding the Signals Between Spikes and Drops
Throughput is a powerful performance metric, but it is essentially meaningless in isolation. Once correlated with other application data, you start to get to the heart of what is driving performance changes in your application.
Application Monitoring 101: Averages Lie, Percentiles Clarify
Everything looks green and happy on your dashboard, so why are your users upset? Dive into the world of percentiles and how to pull clarity from the metric noise to better understand the health of your application.
New Relic vs Scout: A Comparison for Teams Who Actually Ship Code
Compare Scout and New Relic APM: pricing, framework support, and the case against per-user observability pricing. Unlimited users on every Scout plan.
What is AI-Native Monitoring? The Complete Guide for Developers
AI-native monitoring is designed for teams shipping AI-generated code. It brings errors, metrics, and performance data into your LLM, where you already work. Learn how this new approach helps developers tame black-box AI code, cut tool sprawl, and stay in flow — making apps built with AI-generated code easier to debug, scale, and trust.
Rails Apps and Slowdowns: How Scout Shows what Databases Don't
As Rails apps scale, slow SQL can start to become an issue. Database logs can help, but don't show the location of the problem code. Read this post for an understanding of where the problems can start, and how Scout can send slowness packing.
Caching Strategies for Ultra-High Performance in Ruby on Rails, Part 2
Learn how to boost Ruby on Rails app performance and reduce server load in this second part by understanding Rails cache stores: their configuration and memory stores.
Understanding N+1 Database Queries
Identifying, mitigating, and solving scaleable N+1 database queries in Ruby on Rails.
Current DevOps Problems & How Scout APM Solves Them
Do you find it difficult to keep up with how DevOps is developing? DevOps issues are addressed along with how APM can assist in this blog.
WebAssembly (WASM): Opportunities for Ruby Developers
Discover how Web Assembly (WASM) revolutionizes Ruby website performance, optimizing code for unparalleled speed. Explore its transformative impact, ensuring seamless user experiences with advanced optimization techniques.Discover how Web Assembly (WASM) revolutionizes Ruby website performance, optimizing code for unparalleled speed. Explore its transformative impact, ensuring seamless user experiences with advanced optimization techniques.
Overcoming the Cold Start Challenge with Gunicorn Workers in Python in Django Applications
Discover the hidden culprit slowing down your apps: Cold starts. Learn how to optimize performance and enhance user experience by tackling these delays head-on.
Five Tools for Profiling Rails Apps
Finding profilers that reliably work proves to be a bigger challenge than most devs think. Here's a summary of the Rails profiler ecosystem: what works, what doesn't, and each profiler's niche.
Securing Ruby Applications with mTLS
Explore Scout's new mTLS feature for webhook alerting, offering enhanced security through double ID checks and encrypted messaging. Learn about the 'what' and 'why' of mTLS implementation
Monitoring Django Performance with Scout APM: A Step-by-Step Guide
Discover unparalleled performance monitoring for Django with Scout APM. Empower your development team with real-time insights, custom transaction monitoring, error tracking, and seamless GitHub integration, ensuring optimal application performance and a seamless user experience
It's Official, Scout is SOC 2 Certified
Experience peace of mind with our recent achievement: SOC 2 certification. Our unwavering dedication to ensuring the health of your systems and the protection of your customers is now officially recognized. Trust in our commitment to security and join us in celebrating this significant milestone in our journey together.
Exploring OpenTelemetry Configuration in Ruby
This post provides a guide to configure the OpenTelemetry gems in a Ruby on Rails application. It highlights the significance of OpenTelemetry in the Observability space and the need for precise configuration for optimal performance.
A Comprehensive Comparison of New Relic and Scout APM
Get to the heart of your performance problems quickly with Application Performance Management (APM). Choosing between New Relic and Scout can be a complex decision. In this article, we explore the pros and cons of New Relic and Scout APM.
Unlocking the Power of Lambdas in Ruby
Discover the power of lambdas in Ruby with our comprehensive guide. Learn how to effectively use lambdas, the difference between lambdas and Procs, and their performance profiles. Take your Ruby programming skills to the next level.
Scout APM: Reasons to Get a New Dog
Learn how to improve performance and ROI with modern APM technology. Discover the latest tricks in Application Performance Monitoring in this informative article.
Why You Need an Integrated APM to Monitor Operating Costs
Integrated APM system is a must-have tool for monitoring and controlling your operating costs. With real-time visibility and actionable insights, you can improve performance, increase efficiency and reduce costs, stay ahead of competition and make better decision for your business.
Is An APM Solution Worth The Investment?
In today's blog we share our thoughts on why application monitoring is a useful tool, as well as its costs, benefits, and potential ROI.
APM Tool Consolidation and Making the Right Choice for Your Business
Are you using multiple APM tools to monitor your applications? If so, you may be wasting resources. In this blog post, we’ll show you how to consolidate your APM tools saving you time and money.
Scout APM: Your All-in-One APM Tool
You can monitor the performance of your web applications using Scout APM. This dashboard lets you see how your app is performing and identify areas for improvement.
PHP Symfony APM Benefits
Here's how PHP Symfony can benefit from APM. Analyzing performance and tracing transactions in depth. Take Scout APM for a spin to learn more.
The Benefits of APM in a Staging Environment
The sooner you can see how your latest code is performing, the faster you can optimize it. APM metrics can help you with visibility in your application development process.
Optimize Trace Memory with Scout
Want to learn how to optimize trace memory? And the difference between APM tracing and observability tracing? Learn more with Scout APM
New Relic Alternative for Python
The most powerful language is python. It offers every attribute an object-oriented programming language has to offer. Let's evaluate how Scout stacks up against New Relic.
Services Oriented Architecture (SOA): Principles, Benefits, and Implementation
Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a style of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network. The basic principles of SOA
How to Reduce the Costs of Downtime
When it comes to web development, downtime is not an option. If your site goes down, it's not just costing you potential customers - it's costing your team money. Read about how to reduce these costs.
Biggest Mistakes Companies Make When Evaluating & Purchasing APM Software
Since buying an APM tool is not something that you'd do routinely, you should pay extra attention to do everything that can guide you in choosing the best tool for your use case.
External Services Monitoring for Python
Learn how external monitoring for python can help capture and visualize data from an application's execution.
Django Monitoring and APM Benefits
Django is a popular high-level web development framework built on top of Python known for high-speed development and has a more straightforward learning curve than other web frameworks. Learn more about Django monitoring!
Benefits of Flask Monitoring
Flask Monitoring gives you complete visibility into python app performance and errors. Learn the benefits of performance monitoring with Flask!
Sky Rocket APM Performance with Log Analytics
Log Analysis gives insight and visibility into your technology stack’s computer-generated records to help teams respond to incidents
Flask Monitoring and APM Benefits
Monitoring your Flask application can be a challenge. Luckily, there are many companies that provide Flask monitoring services. In this blog we go through the advantages of utilizing Flask, as well as how to use APM to monitor a flask application.
Current State of AIOps Technology
AIOps Technology is used in the majority of organizations today. Learn the future and current state of APM and automated monitoring technologies.
Web Endpoint Monitoring
This article will disucss web endpoints, how they broadly operate, the importance of monitoring them, and how you can get started with endpoint monitoring for your own application using effective APM tools
ROI Benefits of APM Tools
APM provides a helpful bird's eye view of your application and the status of the operations taking place within. Learn more about the ROI of having an APM tool.
The Ultimate OpenTelemetry Guide for Developers
OpenTelemetry is a free and open-source software initiative with the objective of supplying software developers with the means to create distributed systems. Check out this guide to all things Otel!
Open Source APM Tools
Open Source APM Tools are types of software whose source code is publicly accessible. Learn about open source APM and the difference between traditional APM tools
Frontend Monitoring: Benefits and Best Practices
Frontend monitoring is a process of tracking and maintaining the health of an application’s client-side. It involves monitoring the availability, functionality, and performance of the client-side of an application. Learn more!
OpenTelemetry Collector - What Is It?
The OpenTelemetry collector is optional when using a SaaS service like Scout. Even so, knowing what the Collector can do and when to use it is helpful to understand. Click to learn more!
A Look at the 6 Best Python Error Monitoring Tools in 2022
Looking for the perfect error monitoring tool for your python application? Well, we did the research so you wouldn't have to. Check out this list of 6 error monitoring tools that are optimal for python applications!
Monolithic Application Performance Monitoring
Monitoring monolithic architecture is challenging as you cannot see each part of the architecture separately. Read more to learn how to monitor monolithic architecture successfully!
Python Performance Measurement Tools
Python performance measurement tools help us to identify performance bottlenecks in our app. This allows us to focus on the business login as opposed to writing custom code, setting it up with our app, and then figuring out whether the results are accurate enough. These tools are well tested by the open source community and used by many companies to measure the performance of their web apps.
Stackify vs. New Relic vs. Scout | APM Tool Comparison
There are a lot of monitoring tools on the market to choose from, but how do you know which one is right for your business? Check out this comparison of 3 top tools on the market: Stackify, New Relic and Scout.
New Relic vs. Appdynamics vs. Scout APM
New Relic and Appdynamics were the two most dominating APMs in the software industry some years back. But due to some lack of functionalities, customers have begun switching to different tools because now they have a perfect solution for their particular use case. Read more about how Scout compares to some top competitors!
Splunk vs. Dynatrace vs. Scout
You need to choose the perfect monitoring solution that gives you complete visibility over your application’s aspects. To help you in your hunt, we have compared three popular monitoring platforms in this article—Splunk, Dynatrace, and Scout.
Datadog vs. Dynatrace vs. Scout
An APM tool is essential for a successful application. Check out this comparison of three top tools in the market so you choose the right one for your business!
New Relic vs. Sentry vs. Scout
Finding and fixing errors and performance issues can take valuable time away from the development team, preventing them from being able to build new features for their applications.
The 7 Application Performance Metrics You Need to Measure and Why
Understanding what your application performance metrics mean both independently and together is key in effectively using your APM system.
Database Monitoring and Performance
A significant portion of application performance monitoring involves monitoring database performance to ensure that our SQL queries are as efficient as possible. Scout features a Database Monitoring page with this in mind, and in this post, we are going to take a closer look at what it has to offer.
Django and the N+1 Queries Problem
The N+1 Queries Problem is a perennial database performance issue. It affects many ORM’s and custom SQL code, and Django’s ORM is not immune either. In this post, we’ll examine what the N+1 Queries Problem looks like in Django, some tools for fixing it, and most importantly some tools for ...
Video: Identifying Memory Bloat and Monitoring Memory Usage
In this video, we are going to take a look at what memory bloat is, and how you can use Scout to eliminate it from your applications. Which transactions are responsible, and what caused it?
How to Start Using Counter Caches in Rails
Learn how to use counter cache in your rails app, parent-child associations, counter cache best practice.
A Complete Guide to Rails Caching
If you are using Ruby on Rails, caching might be one of the best tools on your belt to build a better application. The idea behind caching in Rails is to serve thousands of concurrent users on a single server with a single database attached. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits caching can provide.
Monitor a Laravel app with Scout
Last month we talked about the PHP monitoring landscape in 2019 and announced that Scout APM would soon be available for monitoring your Laravel applications too (as well as your Ruby, Python and Elixir apps of course!). Now that our PHP monitoring agent is ready for beta testing, we thought it would be a good idea to show you folks how easy it is to get started with it and to highlight the main features to the Laravel community.
Benchmarking Ruby Code
One of the joys of using the Ruby language is the many different ways that you can solve the same problem, it’s a very expressive language with a rich set of libraries. But how do we know which is the best, most efficient, use of the language? When we are talking about algorithms which are critical to the performance of your application, understanding the most efficient approach to take is essential. Perhaps you’ve been using Scout to hunt down issues, and now that you have found an issue, you want to optimize it. Ruby’s Benchmark module provides a very handy way for you to compare and contrast possible optimizations, and when used in conjunction with a good APM solution it will ensure that you have all bases covered. Let’s take a look at how you can get started with it today!
2019 PHP Monitoring Options
There is no denying the popularity of PHP. It has been a constant force in the web development world since its release way back in 1995. And now in 2019, thanks to Laravel, it is still going as strong as ever! Here at Scout, recently we have been working hard on providing a PHP performance monitoring agent to sit alongside our existing ruby, python and elixir agents. Prior to us releasing this PHP agent, let’s take a look at the PHP ecosystem to see how Scout can complement the existing monitoring landscape.
Understanding Disk I/O: When Should You Be Worried?
Disk I/O encompasses the input/output operations on a physical disk.
Is your Django app slow? Think like a data scientist, not an engineer
I'm an engineer by trade. I rely on intuition when investigating a slow Django app. I've solved a lot of performance issues over the years and the short cuts my brain takes often work. However, intuition can fail. It can fail hard in complex Django apps with many layers (ex: ...
Forecasting Web Traffic with Scout and Prophet
Forecasting traffic to your web app is important for capacity planning, but generating a seasonally accurate model of your traffic is pretty daunting. If you under-forecast: Your app servers may become oversaturated, and requests will start backing up in a queue. If you over-forecast you may end up overspending.
Chatting, Coding, and Application Performance Monitoring with Fast JSON:API
It was a great night of chatting, coding, and application performance monitoring in Tokyo. Thanks to everyone who came out to hear our very own Naohiro present about Fast JSON:API. How does Fast JSON:API compare to other Active Model Serializers? Naohiro showed us how he switched from Jbuilder to Fast ...
Scout APM now supports Python 2.7!
We launched our Python agent a few months ago, supporting Python 3.4+.
Monitoring Django apps on Heroku
I don't know of an easier way to deploy a Django app than letting Heroku do the work. That said, how do you stay on top of your app's performance, errors, and stability post-launch? Running an app on Heroku is a blissful experience, but it presents some monitoring challenges that ...
Django Application Monitoring (APM) with StatsD
This post covers instrumenting a Django app with StatsD. StatsD is logging for metrics and is the missing swiss army knife in your measurement toolbelt.
Finding and fixing N+1 queries in Django apps
The Django ORM makes it easy to fetch data, but there's a downside: it's easy to write inefficient queries as the number of records in your database grows.
Your Rails & Elixir performance metrics 📈 inside Chrome Dev Tools
Browser development tools - like Chrome Dev Tools - are vital for debugging client-side performance issues. However, server-side performance metrics have been outside the browser's reach. That changes with the Server Timing API . Supported by Chrome 65+, Firefox 59+, and more browsers, the Server Timing API defines a spec ...
Scout's top-secret 4-point observability plan
Observability: the degree to which you can ask new questions of your system without having to ship new code or gather new data. Above is my slightly modified definition of observability, mostly stolen from Charity Majors in Observability: A Manifesto . Observability is increasingly important . Modern apps and services ...
Rollbar+Scout: a legit New Relic alternative
The New Relic price tag goes up dramatically as your server footprint grows. This might not be an issue if you are utilizing New Relic's full product suite, but what if you just care about error and performance monitoring? In that case, there's a solution that offers richer features as ...
Real User Monitoring with Raygun
Most of a web page's load time is on the front-end. You can monitor the performance of the end-to-end page load time with a Real User Monitoring (RUM) service, and one of the more attractive ones is Raygun Pulse . Let's take a deep dive. Installing Raygun Pulse Installing Pulse ...
DataDog vs. Scout: which is right for you?
You're probably confused where DataDog and Scout overlap. You're not alone! They've each offered similar products since their inception, and come on, they both have dogs in their logos! Here's a timeline to clear things up: Both Scout (2009) and DataDog (2010) started around the same time and focused on ...
Finding fast (but expensive) database queries
A database is a shared resource for a Rails application. A single misbehaving query hitting your database can slow down unrelated queries throughout your system. When we began running our own database monitoring against our apps, we discovered several expensive queries that weren't apparent when viewing individual web endpoints and ...
DevTrace and the Art of Staying the F*** Out of the Way
DevTrace is a performance widget for your Rails applications in development. It sits unobtrusively in the corner of your page, just waiting to drop insight on your application: See stack traces, SQL timings, and more with just a click! This kind of insight is powerful. You can see how your ...
Monitoring Sidekiq Jobs
Teaser for a soon-to-be released capability: Overview metrics for all your background jobs Chart throughput, latency, error rate, and more. Detailed drill-down on slow jobs See what's making the job slow, identify N+1 queries, and more. Tech preview - want in? Background job monitoring currently supports sidekiq, and is tech ...
Git-integrated app monitoring
Tracking down slow code is about to get a lot faster. We're excited to debut our Github Integration for Scout Application Monitoring: With the Github Integration enabled, instead of seeing backtraces for slow method calls (>= 500 ms), you'll see the relevant code in our UI. This goes beyond the ...