Item: Scout APM
Rating: 10
Author: Mixer Gutierrez

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Scout APM helps our engineering team to monitor our main Rails application which is a Monolith hosted on the Heroku platform. It has helped to monitor and debug most of the outages, degradation of response times, or memory bloats for the past 4 years with a great amount of accuracy. It has helped us to do this in our web and background processes.

Pros and Cons

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

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

Return on Investment

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

Alternatives Considered

Datadog

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

Key Insights

Do you think Scout APM delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Scout APM's feature set?

Yes

Did Scout APM live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Scout APM go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Scout APM again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Datadog, Rapid7 InsightOps, Cloudflare

Likelihood to Recommend

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).

Fantastic APM for Rails based apps

Overall Satisfaction with Scout APM