"Examples" Posts
July 03, 2008 by Charles
Posted in HowTo, Examples | no comments 
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Service is changing how we approach computing infrastructure. Scout is an ideal monitoring solution for Ruby on Rails application servers on EC2 instances.
Why use Scout for monitoring your EC2 instances?
- Just a single line of code to add the client
- No complicated scripts to configure – choose what you want to monitor through the Scout web interface
- Easy to re-use or view statistical data once an instance has terminated
Overview
The basic process for EC2 monitoring works like this: You create a new client that you want to use as a template . You can then clone this client (and all of its plugins) using the scout clone command, which can be added to the boot/startup script on your AMI.
Read on for the Step-by-Step.
Read more... 
April 24, 2008 by Derek
Posted in Examples | no comments
Determining a web application’s hardware resources isn’t easy (or cheap). Frankly, it’s often just guesswork. Even when you build benchmarking scripts, they can miss key behaviors and ignore important metrics.
Scaling becomes a lot less stressful when you can quickly compare a history of your application data with server performance.
For example, we did this to get a better understanding of how our Scout server performed during our invitation process. The graph below was generated through Scout and shows the relationship between user accounts and the server load. As we expected, the overall load on the server increased as the number of accounts increased. Scout shows us how this data is correlated – it gives us an idea of how many accounts our current hardware can support.
Scout Accounts vs. Server Load
It’s trivial process to regularly feed Scout your application data (user signups, orders, revenue, etc):
- Start with this Rails App Plugin Sample (this assumes a Ruby on Rails application, but you can do this with any framework/language)
- Grab your application data – just use ActiveRecord!
- Put the plugin on your server (can protect behind basic auth)
- Add the plugin
January 29, 2008 by Derek
Posted in Examples | no comments
We’re using Scout, our monitoring and reporting application, to graph the performance of our Rails applications and servers.
I’ve uploaded a video that looks at how one of our applications, PlaceShout, impacts the server load and Mongrel memory usage. I also compare PlaceShout’s footprint to another server.
Watch the video:
Graphing in Scout 
(1 min 47 sec)
Past Videos on Scout:
Installing the Scout Client (1 min 39 sec)
Installing the Rails Requests Plugin (1 min 55 sec)
Signup for our launch email list
We’ve started emailing invites to Scout. Signup on our homepage, and we’ll give you access to Scout before the public launch.
January 14, 2008 by Derek
Posted in Examples | no comments
Tracking the results of your blatant self-promotion campaign can be a time-consuming effort. You might be using Google Analytics for web traffic and FeedBurner for blog subscribers. You’re probably checking link referrals. You’re querying the database for usage statistics (user signups, logins, etc.), etc.
Scout is an honest friend that gives it to you straight. Our friendly retriever will track, mash, and graph all of this data in real-time.
For example, below is a graph generated by Scout. It shows the FeedBurner circulation of this blog (in red) vs. unique visits from Google Analytics on our Highgroove homepage (in blue):
It doesn’t look like there’s a huge correlation there. What about unique visitors on PlaceShout (in red) vs. unique visitors on our Highgroove site (in blue)? Data via Google Analytics:
There’s a correlation there. Traffic to PlaceShout appears to drives traffic to Highgroove.
Currently, 3 Scout Plugins exist for grabbing external data:
Seeing this data is extremely useful for answering questions that take quite a bit of work to find out manually (and can’t be updated in real-time):
- How many of our unique visitors create a shoutout on PlaceShout?
- As the number of sites linking to us increases, how does this impact traffic on our site?
- How is traffic impacted when we publish our email newsletter?
The great thing about these reports is they don’t require any updates – Scout continually grabs new data and updates the graph.
Signup for our launch email list
We’re launching Scout this winter – click here to signup for our launch notification. We’ll email that list before the public launch.
Get Immediate Access to Scout
I’d like to create a plugin to report back the number of people linking to a url on del.icio.us, but haven’t had time yet. Want to create this plugin? Shoot me an email at (derek at highgroove dot com) and I’ll give you immediate access.
Past posts on Scout:
January 07, 2008 by Derek
Posted in Examples | no comments
When something bad happens you want to find out about it as quickly as possible.
You’re probably notified of uncaught exceptions. What about slow web requests, which can be just as annoying to a user?
Find about about slow web requests (and what might be causing them) in near real-time using Scout and the Ruby on Rails Request Monitoring Plugin.
Here’s how it goes down:
1. Install the Scout Client watch a video (1 min 39 sec)
2. Install the Plugin watch a video (1 min 55 sec)
...that’s it – you’re no longer a performance slacker.
3. Scout reports back data
Every 10 minutes, Scout collects information:
If you have a slow request, an alert is generated. You can view the offending requests and their request times:
View Web Requests on a Graph
You can easily graph this data as well with Scout’s built-in graph builder:
Compare to other Rails applications
...but that’s not all. You probably have multiple Rails applications. You can compare their performance on a single graph as well:
Look for trends against other data
...we’re not done yet though…how about comparing the average request time vs. the size of the mongrel threads through the Process Usage plugin?
Since it’s easy to plot different data stats on Scout, you can quickly rule out possible reasons for slow performance. That’s half the battle.
Signup for our launch email list
We’re launching Scout this winter. Signup on our homepage, and we’ll give you access to Scout before the public launch.
December 26, 2007 by Derek
Posted in Examples | 192 comments
I’ve added 2 videos to the Scout homepage – they demonstrate 3 things:
- Installing the Scout client on a remote server is almost too fast
- One-click plugin configuration (I’m installing the Ruby on Rails Request Monitoring Plugin, so if you’re a Rails developer, there’s an added bonus)
- My awkward narration voice (I think my voice actually cracks on one of them…I assure you, I am not 13 years old).
If you’re looking for an easier way to monitor your servers and web apps, check out the videos. There’s a launch notification form on the Scout homepage as well – we’ll email people on this list before publically launching Scout.
