Request Metrics vs. Scout APM

Request Metrics is great for small web development teams that want to make fast web applications. It was quick for us to get started and we could use the reports right away without having to read through documentation. If you just need to get some performance metrics, Request Metrics is perfect. It would not be so good for a larger team or a complex backend application as it is pretty limited in what it can measure.

To me, it's the best APM out there for a Rails application. It is really easy to set up, configure and start debugging any kind of bad-performing endpoint. We have solved issues going from High Response Time to Memory Leaks/Bloats. All of this can be achieved even if you are hosting your app in a PaaS like Heroku. (Where sometimes is difficult to install an agent like in other vendors).

Incentivized

• Performance charts are really simple and easy for us to understand what is happening
• It was easy to get started and doesn't need administration or training
• It's affordable for our team
• It's fast

• Rails instrumentation
• Segmentation by controllers and sometimes methods
• Detecting low performing endpoints

Incentivized

• I wish that it could also do uptime checking of the site
• There is not enough detail to drill into individual users

• Errors (is a new functionality but I didn't get well how it can replace rollbar for example).
• Usage measuring: In some cases is easy to get "disabled" due to a peak of bad requests.
• Editing app's names

Incentivized

We also consider Speedcurve and Calibre for monitoring. Speedcurve was really nice, but the reports were slow. We had to wait a lot to get information. It was also out of our budget and would require extra justification to use it. Calibre was also nice, but the numbers were based on synthetic rather than real user performance. We felt that this wasn't as helpful for us.

We have preferred Scout APM over Datadog due to: - Easy to configure and install on Heroku Platform (Datadog's agent can give some trouble when installing it on Heroku's Dynos) - Easy to monitor normal behavior and be actionable on endpoints who are out of normal - It has an easier pricing which facilitates to make predictions on budget

Incentivized

• The launch of our project dashboard was much smoother and more successful because we could fix problems earlier
• It fit without our existing operations budget

• Speed to solve incidents
• Easy to monitor new endpoints or deployments
• Easy to monitor background jobs (like sidekiq)

Incentivized