Kevin Lawver , President @ Rails Machine , is our guest author for this post. Few things feel worst than rolling out a High Availability (HA) system, then regularly seeing that system collapse. For our team at Rails Machine, that failing HA system was MySQL Multi-Master Replication Manager (MMM) . ... Read more

I've been hearing how Docker is the new awesome, but it didn't click for me until I dug in with a practical question: if we deployed Scout via Docker, would deployment be a more pleasurable experience? My three takeaways are below. Finally, an efficient way to simulate our production environment ... Read more

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 ... Read more

Back in 2010 , we suggested using /bin/bash -l -c to run scout via Cron when using RVM . However, this was a brute approach: /bin/bash -l -c tells bash to behave as a login, interactive process. However, as Daniel Szmulewicz elequently stated in the comments for the original blog ... Read more

On Jan 15th, all Scout accounts will be switched over to notification groups. Notification groups are designed to make notifiation management easier and more flexible: instead of managing notifications per-plugin/per-user, you will assign users to notification groups, and apply notification groups to triggers. you can have multiple PagerDuty integrations and ... Read more

Every man has their breaking point when it comes to deadweight code. Andre and I hit ours recently and decided to spend all of last week focusing soley on cleaning up Scout (a Rails app). Our goals: Faster tests – our tests took 8 minutes to complete. While it’s the ... Read more

We’ve added prolific plugin contributor Eric Lindvall ’s latest plugins to Scout: Kestrel Overall and Kestrel Queue Monitoring . Kestrel is a simple message queue built from production needs at Twitter. Being the gentleman he is, Eric shared his experiences with Kestrel at Papertrail , a hosted log aggregation service. ... Read more

Got a site you need to serve up via SSL ? Here are your Cliffs notes. This assumes 1) your site already runs without SSL ; 2) you’re using Apache and Ubuntu; 3) you don’t want any browser warnings, so no self-signed certificates. 1. Generate a Private Key $ openssl ... Read more

To inspire hard work, some young men hang a poster on their wall that includes: (1) an exotic sports car (2) a scantly clad lady and (3) a beach house. My inspirational poster would be much less attractive: a friendly butler who offers time-honored wisdom (with an accent because people ... Read more

First, Tina Fey needs to write more. Both of her New Yorker articles have been terrific. Second, her latest New Yorker piece had a great nugget on how producing is about discouraging creativity: You may have an occasion where the script calls for a bran muffin on a white plate, ... Read more