12.01.2015
Scout Monitoring, creators of highly reliable server and application monitoring solutions created by developers for developers, has released the first application performance monitoring (APM) service for developers deploying apps to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. Scout APM represents the next phase in developer migration to writing software for PaaS, allowing programmers to design and troubleshoot specialized apps faster than ever before.
“Scout gives us unprecedented performance insights into our web apps: down to the slow line-of-code, associated database calls, the developer that wrote it, and when the code was changed. Putting the pieces together without Scout would take hours – we’re able to do it in minutes with Scout,” says Aaron Scruggs, CTO of AcademicWorks, the leading provider of scholarship management solutions for universities, community colleges, and community foundations. “Now, more of our development team’s time is spent delivering great features, not tracking down performance issues.”
Before the advent of software-as-as-service, developers were responsible for the full-stack of their application, from the load balancer down to the database servers. Vendors and hosted services have offloaded many of those functions, such as Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (load balancer) and Relational Database Service (database). As a result, software engineers worry less about infrastructure plumbing and spend more time writing custom application code. Although this means more and better value-added applications, it also means new issues with increasingly complex custom code that slows performance.
Scout APM was developed as a hosted solution to instrument web app custom code versus the full stack infrastructure stack. By providing a targeted, application-specific APM solution that isolates problems in custom code, Scout APM addresses the most time-consuming developer issue – finding and fixing bottlenecks in custom code – while avoiding areas for which developers are not responsible.
“Anyone writing software to run on a hosted, platform-as-a-service like Heroku or Cloud Foundry knows that the only code they need to worry about runs on the App Server,” said Derek Haynes, CEO of Scout. “Since they aren’t responsible for uptime or services beyond the app code, we developed Scout APM as a surgical tool to fix problems in custom code.”
Where most APM tools use sampling and make it hard to pinpoint problems, Scout APM goes beyond simple code metrics assessment. Scout APM identifies five key elements behind every slow app request: who wrote it, where the line of code resides, when was it committed and deployed, which file, and what is the database analysis. Rather than spending hours to isolate a performance problem, Scout APM can isolate the problem in minutes, including the programmer best suited to address it.
Scout APM also has three key features that make it an excellent tool for app performance troubleshooting:
1. Captures every request – Where most APM solutions merely sample slow requests, Scout APM captures every request to provide better insight into app performance.
2. Integrates with Git – Works with Git open source version control to make it easy to identify who wrote the code, and when.
3. Provides context – In addition, Scout APM allows you to attach custom context to slow requests. For example: identify the email address of the user that triggered the event, the associated database shard, and the customer’s monthly spend.
Finally, Scout APM has a flexible pricing model for both apps running on PaaS services and those powered by traditional servers. Customers can choose to be billed by their request volume (starting at $20/month) or by the number of hosts their app runs on (starting at $59/host).
Scout APM is available now. For more information about Scout APM and Scout Server, visit www.scoutapp.com.
scoutapp.com
