June 27
Andre
Posted in Features | 
Comments
We heard your feedback: adding charts to dashboards is a pain. No longer! Look for the Add Chart button on dashboards to add charts in one step. You don’t have to create a chart separately before adding it to a dashboard.
Big picture – we’re always looking for ways to make Scout easier to use. If there’s something clumsy or difficult you’d like to see improved, hit up the Scout suggestion page.
Recently in charts:
June 20
Derek
Posted in Examples | Comments
Josh Nichols of Rails Machine on their monitoring philosophy:
Measure all the metrics and alert on metrics that are actionable.
If you’ve got a bunch of servers, you’re going to want to read Josh Nichols’ How we roll with Scout article on the Rails Machine blog.
Rails Machine is a Ruby on Rails-focused managed hosting provider, which means they’re on the front lines when performance goes bad. From plugins to alerting, Josh details how they stay proactive on performance.
June 19
Andre
Posted in Features | Comments
The only thing worse than being woken up by a critical alert: not being woken up when you should be. That’s where Pagerduty comes in—Pagerduty uses a combination of email, SMS, and phone calls to you and your team to ensure you never miss an important notification.
And now, Scout has baked-in support for notifications via PagerDuty. Scout can automatically create incidents when a trigger fires, and automatically resolve it too.
”Getting Scout alerts though Pagerduty works great. Setting it up was completely seamless.”—T.R. Missner, Firespotter Labs
Setup is Easy
Assuming you already have a Pagerduty account, integration is ridiculously easy:
- make sure you’re logged into Scout as an administrator.
- click on “Notifications”, then “Connect to PagerDuty.”
- You’ll be redirected to Pagerduty’s website. Enter your Pagerduty credentials and select the service to associate with Scout:
And you’re done! There’s no API key to copy / paste. If you ever need to disconnect, just click “disconnect” in Scout.
New to Pagerduty?
Pagerduty provides on-call schedules, configurable escalation rules, and incident acknowledgment for all your monitoring services. PagerDuty ensures the right person gets notified, every time. Browse the feature list here, and sign up here with a 10% discount just for Scout users.
Here’s a snapshot of Pagerduty’s notification dashboard:
Pagerduty is the Notifications Expert
If you need sophisticated notification options (like rotating schedules and escalation rules), Pagerduty is for you. Partnering with Pagerduty allows Scout to focus on what we do best—powerful, easy-to-setup monitoring tools.
See Also
May 31
Derek
Posted in Development, HowTo | Comments
Scout’s realtime charts have been a big hit. Once you start using them for major deploys or performance incidents, going back to ten terminal windows running “top” feels like the dark ages.
Realtime was a lot of fun to implement and it’s been rock-solid so far. A big reason it was so much fun? We were able to implement all of it in Ruby (outside the Javascript used to handle websockets in the browser) and didn’t need to deploy any infrastructure .
So, how did we go about it?
Read more... 
May 23
Derek
Posted in Features | Comments
When you’re building a chart in Scout, you select metrics from a tree. It branches like this: group => server => plugin => metrics.
This makes it easy to drill-down to a given metric on a specific server. However, it’s very common to compare the same metric across servers. For example: how does our memory usage compare across all of our app servers? Say hello to the new metric context menu:
He’s a useful little guy. After selecting a metric in the chart tree, just click on the 
icon and select the instances you’d like to see on the chart.
May 18
Andre
Posted in Features | Comments
Since we added low value support for peak triggers a few months ago, similar support for plateau triggers has been a common request.
We heard you: plateau triggers now also support low values. You can, for example, be alerted when when Apache requests drop below a certain threshold for 30 minutes or more.
May 10
Derek
Posted in Business | Comments
It seems that today, the light at the end of the startup tunnel is either (1) being acquired or (2) a billion-dollar IPO. Let’s just throw out the IPO - it’s incredibly rare.
This means that many startups are created with an explicit goal to not exist in five-or-so years. Does anyone see something wrong with this?
No one talks about starting a company that becomes an extension of yourself. Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway. Apple and Steve Jobs. Starbucks and Howard Schultz. Amazon and Jeff Bezos.
Why?
May 04
Derek
Posted in Updates | Comments
A month ago my family and I moved from one special city to another: San Francisco to Fort Collins, Colorado. While we’ve only lived here a short time, we couldn’t be happier. You probably know many of the one-of-kind-things about San Francisco. Here’s some of the things that make “The Fort” special:
- Bikes – Whether you’re cruising around or hammering, Ft. Collins is an amazing experience on two wheels. Almost every street has a bike lane, and for those that don’t, there’s usually a nearby dedicated trail. The city itself is flat – which is perfect for going to the office – but immediately to the west, the foothills of the Rockies beckon with all the scenic road and mountain biking you could ask for.
- Beer – With 11 breweries, Ft. Collins is the second largest producer of beer in the top-ranked beer producing state (and yes, you can pretty much bike to all of them).
- Tech – There’s a small (by SF standards) but super-friendly tech community in Ft. Collins. I’m working out of Cohere, an awesome coworking space in the middle of Ft. Collins. Conveniently, the monthly Ruby Meetup meets here. Boulder, home to many startups, is an hour south.
- Climate – Winter happens here (it’s mild), but summer does too!
When you combine the above bullets, it’s no wonder Ft. Collins consistently ranks among the best places to live in America. If you’re in the area, don’t hesitate to ping me for a visit!
April 27
Derek
Posted in Development | Comments
Ernest Hemingway via Letters of Note
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
Sounds a lot like writing code too, huh?
April 25
Andre
Posted in Updates | Comments
Charts got some updates today:
- More colors available: previously, charts had just six colors and nine shades of gray available for plotting metrics. The new color scheme uses HTML standard colors, and makes it easier to follow lines on busy charts.
- Timeframe selection on dashboards: dashboard charts now default to a 5-hour timeframe. You can easily zoom out all charts simultaneously by clicking the new links at the top. This lets you quickly broaden your view to see what’s going on, without having to navigate to a bunch of charts individually.
- No more iFrames on dashboards: by encapsulating the chart code better, we were able to get rid of iFrames on dashboards. This makes the dashboard page much lighter on memory (a typical dashboard might be 50MB lighter), and also fixes some quirky behavior when you’re resizing a chart.
- Nice looking URLS: chart URLs are prettier and easier to copy-paste—there are no more encoded characters in the URL.
