Sponsor Spotlight: AppSignal

Time for another Spotlight… today we’re talking to AppSignal!

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Hi all,

AppSignal started five years ago when we realized there were almost no full stack monitoring solutions out there for Ruby on Rails. We thought, why would you need to use different tools for error, performance and server monitoring? Hence we proceed to execute our vision successfully in the Ruby world. About two years ago we heard about Elixir and naturally wanted to replicate our success on it.

We were immediately charmed by the Ruby-esque approach while leveraging the full power of the Erlang VM. We knew we wanted to be a part of this, and so got some help writing an integration and launched a first version a couple months later. Now, numerous Elixir powered companies use AppSignal as their monitoring solution.

Besides adding support for showing microseconds in the UI (milliseconds were enough when we just had Ruby support), one of the nicest things implementing our Elixir package was its ease of integration.

Phoenix’s built-in instrumentation allowed us to extract information about a request by registering as an instrumenter, and we receive query information as an Ecto logger. This means we could measure performance for both without requiring users to change their code.

Although our Plug integration relies on wrapping the call/2 function for recording errors without having the app crash first, AppSignal listens to crashing processes elsewhere by registering as a report handler into Erlang’s :error_logger.

We have really fallen in love with Elixir and are sponsoring many open-source projects. We remember clearly how Ruby on Rails felt in its first few years, and we see the same promise and excitement in the Elixir community. We’re in this for the long run and we can’t wait to see what’s next for Elixir! If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to let us know, and we would love for you to give us feedback and/or try our service :slight_smile:

PS: Do you maintain an open-source or “for good” Elixir project? Let us know and we’ll set you up with a free plan!

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