Scout Checks in on Passenger

August 22, 2008 by James

Posted in Plugins, Updates | no comments

The number one requested plugin for Scout has been a Phusion Passenger monitor. I’m happy to report that is now available.

Using the new Passenger Monitor plugin, Scout can keep track of Passenger’s VM size, process count, and the amount of private memory it has squirreled away. Aside from just tracking these numbers for graphs, you can also elect to be emailed if any of these statistics crosses a line you indicate. As an added bonus, this plugin also tracks the same statistics for the Apache instance managing Passenger.

Passenger has quickly become a great new way to deploy Rails applications and we want to make sure Scout is keeping up with the curve.

Track our plugins on GitHub

August 05, 2008 by Charles

Posted in Updates | no comments

You can now follow our commits to Scout plugins at our GitHub Repository.

GitHub makes it easy to find out when new plugins are created. Feel free to fork us (as long as forking is legal in your part of the world).

Quick note – remember to use the raw format when using your own plugins from GitHub by appending ?raw=true to the plugin script URL.

Also see:

• Write your own Scout plugin
• Customize a Scout plugin

Everything is easier with Scout Client 2.0

June 09, 2008 by Derek

Posted in Updates | no comments

We’ve released the 2nd version of our Scout client. What I love about this release is that it doesn’t make anything more complex or break compatibility with our first release. It just makes writing plugins easier.

For example – lets say you want to generate an alert. How’s this for simplicity?

class INeedASandwich < Scout::Plugin
  def build_report
     alert(:subject => "Get me a sandwich")
  end
end

We’ve also made the process for managing memory (data stored on the client between runs of the plugin) easier to work with. Memory is a great tool for storing state.

For example:

class INeedASandwich < Scout::Plugin
  def build_report
    if memory(:am_i_hungry)
      alert(:subject => "Get me a sandwich")
      remember(:am_i_hungry => false)
    else
      remember(:am_i_hungry => true)
    end
  end
end

As always, updating to the latest release is as simple as:

• Learn about the differences between v2 and v1
• View the updated HowTo Write a Plugin Article

[1] Rubyforge is slow to update, in the meantime, use our gem server mirror