The Dogs of Scout
If it isn't clear from our logo, or our offer to give you a puppy if you don't love Scout more than the competition , the Scout team loves dogs. Here are some of our favorite coding buddies: Dave's...
Scout Blog
Stuff we think matters
Overhead Benchmarks: New Relic vs. Scout
High monitoring overhead is a silent killer : your app's requests take longer, throughput capacity shrinks, end users requests start stacking up in a request queue, you react by provisioning more...
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 ...
An intro to the Docker Stats API
If I was teaching Server Health 101, I'd start with four key metrics: CPU Usage Memory Usage Network I/O Disk Utilization The approach for fetching these metrics on Linux hosts is tried-and-true (hint: look in the /proc folder). However, I was curious about Docker Containers: where do I access these ...
Implementing Docker event monitoring from scratch
Docker's API provides a ton of functionality around containers and images - but there is a hidden secret, one that is easy to miss in the documentation: Docker's API has the capability to report host...
DevOpsDaysRox
Last week, I spent Thursday (4/23/15) and Friday (4/24/15) at DevOpsDaysRox . If you've never attended a DevOpsDays events - find your closest one here and signup now. So what makes DevOps Day special? First, you'll find an active community that prides itself on inclusion and making everyone feel welcome. ...
Monitoring Docker with docker-scout
When it comes to agent-based monitoring and Docker , you're typically choosing between two bad options: (1) install the agent and its dependencies directly on the host or (2) running an agent in...
From MySQL full-text search to Elasticsearch
Migrating backend search technologies on a high-throughput production site is no easy task, but Vector Media Group was recently faced with this decision. With a popular client site struggling under the load of complex MySQL full-text search queries, they recently switched to Elasticsearch . I spoke with Matt Weinberg to ...
Understanding disk inodes
You try creating a file on a server and see this error message: No space left on device ...but you've got plenty of space: df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 10321208 3159012 6637908 33% / Who is the invisible monster chewing up all of your space? Why, ...
From Ruby to Go: a rewrite for the future
During a team camp among the lofty peaks of Breckenridge, Colorado, we talked a lot about the future of Scout and monitoring in general. Big mountains and nature have a way of doing that. One thing that was getting our nerd juices flowing: Go . At Monitorima in May, it ...
Slow Server? This is the Flow Chart You're Looking For
Your high-powered server is suddenly running dog slow, and you need to remember the troubleshooting steps again. Bookmark this page for a ready reminder the next time you need to diagnose a slow...
Understanding CPU Steal Time - when should you be worried?
A big thanks to Eric Lindvall of Papertrail for adding steal time to Scout's CPU Usage Plugin and helping out on this blog post! Netflix tracks CPU Steal Time closely. In fact, if steal time exceeds their chosen threshold, they shut down the virtual machine and restart on a different ...