5 ms·

Monitoring the Erlang VM With AppSignal's Magic Dashboard

78 points by Liriel 7y ago

adamzapasnik 7y ago
Looks very cool. I've been using Sentry, but this is something that may make me switch to AppSignal at some point. It's so good to see so many improvements/cool features in Elixir/Erlang ecosystem.
thejosh 7y ago
Appsignal is very very good! I highly recommend it for Elixir projects if you only use elixir and need something setup fast. It's awesome! I also highly recommend looking into spans and tracing (if you use multiple languages together), then you can use something like spandex with elixir and other languages to do tracing across languages. It's excellent with datadog.
te_chris 7y ago
We're using Appsignal and it's been great. Fantastic support too.
davidw 7y ago
Looks like a web version of Erlangs "observer" app, offhand.
- hopia 7y ago
  It's not, observer is still different. AppSignal's monitoring shows useful metrics but does not allow examining the supervisor tree and other things possible with Observer and other OTP tooling. In some sense, it's not a live debugging tool but a monitoring dashboard.
- gallexme 7y ago
  There's a web based observer, it's called wobserver https://github.com/shinyscorpion/wobserver https://github.com/shinyscorpion/wobserver
  - hew 7y ago
    Yes, but it's woefully out of date. Fun fact -- Ian (maintainer) is/was a backend dev at Square Enix.
  - davidw 7y ago
    The guy behind the Cowboy web server was working on one a while back and it looked super cool, but I don't know what became of it.
atonse 7y ago
I've been very happy with AppSignal for my Elixir projects (introduced them to 3 paying customers). I especially like their request-based pricing model. It makes it a no brainer to put it on every rails/elixir project under one account (per paying customer). Disclaimer: they have sent me a box of delicious cookies for creating an open source plugin (ember deploy plugin for automatically uploading source maps to AppSignal). But I have liked them way before that :)
lobo_tuerto 7y ago
If interested in setting up CI/CD for Elixir, this might be worth checking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236049
mc_ 7y ago
WombatOAM seems similar: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/products/wombatoam.html https://www.erlang-solutions.com/products/wombatoam.html
beastman82 7y ago
this is a little too much handwaving for my tastes.
regulation_d 7y ago
I tried out AppSignal for Elixir and was disappointed that the BEAM metrics don’t include scheduler utilization, which is kind of a proxy for CPU usage. IIRC there was scheduler count but not utilization metrics.

78 points by Liriel 7y ago

Looks very cool. I've been using Sentry, but this is something that may make me switch to AppSignal at some point. It's so good to see so many improvements/cool features in Elixir/Erlang ecosystem.

thejosh 7y ago

Appsignal is very very good! I highly recommend it for Elixir projects if you only use elixir and need something setup fast. It's awesome! I also highly recommend looking into spans and tracing (if you use multiple languages together), then you can use something like spandex with elixir and other languages to do tracing across languages. It's excellent with datadog.

te_chris 7y ago

We're using Appsignal and it's been great. Fantastic support too.

davidw 7y ago

Looks like a web version of Erlangs "observer" app, offhand.

hopia 7y ago
It's not, observer is still different. AppSignal's monitoring shows useful metrics but does not allow examining the supervisor tree and other things possible with Observer and other OTP tooling. In some sense, it's not a live debugging tool but a monitoring dashboard.
gallexme 7y ago
There's a web based observer, it's called wobserver https://github.com/shinyscorpion/wobserver https://github.com/shinyscorpion/wobserver
- hew 7y ago
  Yes, but it's woefully out of date. Fun fact -- Ian (maintainer) is/was a backend dev at Square Enix.
- davidw 7y ago
  The guy behind the Cowboy web server was working on one a while back and it looked super cool, but I don't know what became of it.

atonse 7y ago

I've been very happy with AppSignal for my Elixir projects (introduced them to 3 paying customers). I especially like their request-based pricing model. It makes it a no brainer to put it on every rails/elixir project under one account (per paying customer). Disclaimer: they have sent me a box of delicious cookies for creating an open source plugin (ember deploy plugin for automatically uploading source maps to AppSignal). But I have liked them way before that :)

lobo_tuerto 7y ago

If interested in setting up CI/CD for Elixir, this might be worth checking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236049

mc_ 7y ago

WombatOAM seems similar: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/products/wombatoam.html https://www.erlang-solutions.com/products/wombatoam.html

beastman82 7y ago

this is a little too much handwaving for my tastes.

regulation_d 7y ago

I tried out AppSignal for Elixir and was disappointed that the BEAM metrics don’t include scheduler utilization, which is kind of a proxy for CPU usage. IIRC there was scheduler count but not utilization metrics.