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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Rails
Key Early Considerations Before Big Architecture or Technology Decisions
In this final part, the Scout team continues our talk with Freedom Dumalo, former CTO at Flexcar and current CTO at Vestmark. We discuss some essential questions about architecture, touch on Rails, Turbo, and Stimulus, and the key considerations for those starting off before they lock in an architecture or tech decision.
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.
Caching Strategies for Ultra-High Performance in Ruby on Rails, Part 1
Learn how to boost Ruby on Rails app performance and reduce server load with cache strategies like page, action, and Russian Doll caching, cache stores, and more.
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.
5 hard-earned lessons from a decade of Rails performance work
The last 3,650 days of my professional life have been focused on making Rails apps faster. Below are five lessons I've learned the hard way. 1. Facts alone won't convince the business folk to care about performance The typical pitch to prioritize making an app faster & more reliable goes ...
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.
What’s new in Rails 6?
With the official release of Rails 6 just around the corner, we round up all the major new features coming your way. It is an exciting release due to some big features coming upstream from the Basecamp and GitHub projects. Amongst the many minor updates, useful tweaks and bug fixes, Rails 6 will ship with two completely new frameworks: ActionText and ActionMailbox, and two big scalable-by-default features: parallel testing and multiple database support. So set your Gemfile to get Rails 6.0.0.rc1 and let’s get started!
Making sense of ActiveRecord joins, includes, preload, and eager_load
Like a pair of jumper cables, ActiveRecord's joins , includes , preload , and eager_load methods are incredibly useful, but also very dangerous when used incorrectly. Knowing when and where to use each approach - and even when to combine them - can save you considerable trouble.
ActiveRecord: biting the hand that feeds you
Richard Schneeman (better known as Schneems) recently wrote about how he reduced his database server load by 80% ...with one simple trick . In the Hacker News discussion that followed, much of the debate was on the merits of using an ORM like ActiveRecord...or not: In every case I can ...
The danger of Rails.env.production?
When I do a code review, one of the scariest things I see is logic like this: if Rails.env.production? do_additional_work end Why? Your beautiful tests and tightly integrated CI system won't execute that code. You won't see that code execute as you refresh your browser in development. From syntax errors ...
Finding slow ActiveRecord queries with Scout
Once your Rails app begins seeing consistent traffic, slow SQL queries will likely rear their ugly head, but how can you easily tell where your app is slowing down?
Setting up a Rails app for CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline on AWS
If you've followed along with our previous episodes, we've covered many different aspects of setting up a production service. We've used many different products to simplify the day-to-day operations of running and maintaining an application. We've used Scout for monitoring our application, LogDNA for aggregating our logs, HoneyBadger for our ...
Deploying to AWS Part III: Log aggregation
Looking for a fresh, 2018 approach to deploying a Rails app to AWS? We've partnered with DailyDrip on a series of videos to guide you through the process. We'll be covering how to Dockerize a Rails app, AWS Fargate, logging, monitoring, and CDN support. In our last video , we ...
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 ...
5 Pillars of Rails Cluster Monitoring
Photo by mollypop My how you’ve grown! A couple of years ago your little Rails app was on a single server. Now you’re on a whole cluster – you’ve got web servers, database servers, HAProxy servers, and more. I’m so proud of you! Monitoring your Rails cluster has gotten more ...