AppSignal for Elixir: the first real-time APM for Elixir & Phoenix

Hi all,

And it’s a go! After many months of hard work and incorporating feedback from about fifty early adopters, we’re officially launching AppSignal for Elixir today. It’s the first fully featured platform providing error tracking and performance insights for Elixir and Phoenix applications.

So, why Elixir you may ask? In 2005, AppSignal co-founders Thijs and myself started 80beans, one of the first European Ruby consultancies. Rails was at version 0.12, and only a handful –arguably insane– companies were using Ruby on Rails for large production apps. But we loved the language and the community, grew with the platform and the market, and became one of the leading Ruby consultancies in Western Europe. This evolved into AppSignal, the platform we’re now focused on full-time with a team of seven people. With Ruby, we bet on the right horse.

Last year, we saw a new language and associated framework gain popularity, and we felt as excited as we did in 2005. No one else had built a consolidated exception tracking and performance monitoring platform for Elixir yet. Exception trackers were starting to support it, but for errors only. New Relic told people to build something on top of their SDK, which lead to an open source project without official support. We already had this fully featured product for Ruby apps, and decided it was time for a new horse to bet on.

Luckily, by the end of 2014, we already knew we wanted to support more languages in the future. It took us over half a year to port all the heavy lifting from the Ruby gem to a native library written in Rust. That way we “only” had to build integrations later. That turned out to be true, though you still need intimate knowledge of a language to both integrate with it and be able to deliver A+ technical support (which kind of limited the speed at which we could move). Plus, we wanted to support all features that our Ruby integration offers as well.

Today marks the moment where for us, it all comes together. The amazing language, its awesome international community, and the ability to provide amazing insights into the workings of our Elixir apps. Coupled with hardware insights, custom metrics, and a whole bunch of workflow features we’re pretty happy with the end result (and since every end is a beginning, we’ll be constantly working on adding and improving features across all integrations). For pricing, we decided to keep it simple: we only charge for requests and we don’t care about number of hosts or which languages you’re using. Pay once, and combine as many Ruby and Elixir apps as you wish.

Thanks for helping us build awesome stuff! If you have any questions or feedback, make sure to let us know (email us at support@appsignal.com for the fastest reply). As always, Elixir Forum members get 10% off for a year with coupon “elixirforum” (surprise!).

Give it a try! The first 30 days are absolutely free, and you don’t need to enter any billing details.

Alright, I’m off to the races, looking for a horse to bet on next…

Best,
Roy
Co-Founder & Chief Stroopwafel Officer

22 Likes

Ah its finally released! Been looking forward to looking in to it. :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Yes! It took a while, but we’re out of beta now, and ready to conquer the world :muscle: ^Roy

6 Likes

Congrats Roy, looks awesome :023:

4 Likes

Awesome, good timing! We are going to launch soon and last week I decided to go with InfluxDB + Grafana for Metrics and Honeybadger for error catching and monitoring. But having the option to put everything in a single platform (and specially not having to worry about maintaining InfluxDB) I’ll consider AppSignal.

EDITED: Aww, the lack of support for additional metadata in metrics will be a no-go for us. We use InfluxDB tags and fields heavily. I.e. consider a chat message came in, we increase the counter, but also store the company id the message is related to. So in our dashboard we show metrics regarding all messages (without filtering anything). A company user will see metrics related only to his company, naturally (we filter by tag, with the company id).

We may also filter by message type (image, text, etc).

2 Likes

Hi Alfred, sorry for being so slow to respond, but I’m pretty sure we can accommodate what you’re looking for. Tagging is very well possible, and we have some other sweet tooling (like Custom Metrics) as well. Hit me up at support@appsignal.com if you’d like to discuss details! ^Roy

3 Likes

A post was split to a new topic: Elixir Alchemy - new email series from AppSignal

Just integrated AppSignal into our umbrella application, very easy to do and works great. We’re hosted on Heroku so we’re seeing data I assume from the node we’re in currently, not app specific. Is this intended? @AppSignal - anyways I can see data specific to my dynos?

1 Like

All the metrics except for total memory are specific to your Dyno. Unfortunately there is no way to get the total memory that’s assigned to a container. This information is only available on the host machine, which we do not have access to.

We are considering removing the total memory metric to avoid confusion. Hopefully in the future it will become possible to gather this metric.

^Thijs

1 Like