May 22
Derek
Posted in HowTo | 
Comments
We run background jobs on our Scout servers. Lots of them.
As we’ve grown, they’ve used dramatically more resources. We needed a way to simmer them down. Most of these jobs load the entire Rails environment – that’s a hefty overhead.
We’ve modified how we run background jobs and we’re seeing great results. If you’re interested in what we did, checkout Charles’ post on our Highgroove blog.
And finally, here’s the obligatory semi-promotional graph, generated by Scout, of how the load dramatically decreased after implementation:
May 08
Charles
Posted in HowTo | Comments
Since Scout Plugins are open source, it’s easy to modify them to fit your needs.
Here’s a quick way to create a custom version of a Scout plugin.
1. Grab the current plugin and options
The code:
curl http://plugins.scoutapp.com/mongrel_cluster_monitor/trunk/mongrel_cluster_monitor.rb \
> mongrel_cluster_monitor.rb
The options:
curl http://plugins.scoutapp.com/mongrel_cluster_monitor/trunk/mongrel_cluster_monitor.yml \
> mongrel_cluster_monitor.yml
2. Edit the plugin code and test
scout -p /path/to/customized/mongrel_cluster_monitor.rb \
-o '{"mongrel_cluster_configuration_dir"=>"/etc/mongrel_cluster"}' \
-v -l debug
That says, use the -p option (or --plugin) and the -o (or --option) to
test locally, passing these options, be verbose (--verbose) and
set the log level to debug (--log-level debug).
Note that you could also add your own “option” there, as the path to
one of the configuration files…. however you want to do it.
3. Host the Plugin
Then, all you have to do is make that plugin and its options file (of
the same name) URL accessible (put it in your rails public dir,
perhaps, or on another server) for the scout server to be able to grab
it when you install. When you install, choose, Manual—and type in
the URL to your new customized version
(http://highgroove.com/new_customized_single_mongrel.rb for
example).
More on creating plugins
April 28
Derek
Posted in HowTo | Comments
By default, when you create a report in Scout, we assume that the data corresponds to the time the report was submitted.
Sometimes this isn’t the case – for example, you can retrieve the number of subscribers to your RSS feeds in Feedburner, but not from the current day.
You can override the time Scout records the data in a Plugin with the special :scout_time report key.
Here’s an example:
# typical report data
{:circulation => 1000}
# correspond the data w/ February 24, 2008
{:circulation => 1000, :scout_time => Time.parse("2/24/08")}
When displaying the data on a graph, the data will be shown on 2/24 and not the current date:
Learn more about creating Scout Plugins
