How a Mistake Led Me to Discover Better Observability with Rails and SigNoz
Hello everyone,
I’d like to share a quick update on what’s been happening with httpscout and some insights from the recent launch.
Initially, I set up Prometheus and Grafana for httpscout, enjoying the process of hosting them myself, but, after the latest launch, I noticed some gaps in monitoring. Mostly, I missed having tracing, and building dashboards in Grafana gradually became more painful.
On a friend’s recommendation, I decided to try SigNoz, an open-source Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability tool.
I was skeptical–Rails has somewhat iffy support in the DevOps/SRE land, but I’m happy to say that setting up SigNoz was straightforward. They provide reasonably easy-to-follow instructions and a useful docker-compose file.
I also discovered some open-source Open Telemetry gems gems for Rails.
As of yesterday, httpscout is now monitored by a self-hosted SigNoz installation 🎉.
My first impressions are very positive– SigNoz is a good fit for this phase of httpscout’s development. It’s also past time to start moving away from Grafana and focus more on learning about OpenTelemetry.
More updates to come!