Scout APM Blog

Scout should also be added to this list, great server monitoring/graphing/alerting platform! http://www.scoutapp.com/ (Just a customer, don't work there)

These tools are great for looking at what's happening now if you're logged into the server. They're complemented by monitoring products like: Self hosted: - Nagios (already mentioned in the post) - Cacti / Munin Hosted: - http://www.serverdensity.com (tool my company produces) - http://www.cloudkick.com (monitoring + cloud infrastructure management) - http://www.scoutapp.com these give you similar metrics plus various other things like alerting, graphs, mobile apps, etc.

http://scoutapp.com again saved my bacon yesterday when my god monitoring script for DelayedJob workers decided to pull an Ark with my processes ("let's have two of everything!") and ran out of swap, bringing the server to a virtual standstill. Scout sent me an email, the email rang my cell phone, and I was able to recover before it ruined my best day of sales ever.

You may want to reconsider the design of your logo: https://scoutapp.com/

http://scoutapp.com Dead simple to install and use. Fancy graphs, lots of useful plugins for monitoring processes. Using it for more than a year, no problems, responsive support. $15/server/month.

They said they use it on their own production servers so of course I couldn't resist... http://scoutapp.com:5555/ Really nice looking monitoring, though. I think it's fun to see the stats scrolling by.

Curious how this compares to https://scoutapp.com/ The big disadvantage I see is that I still need to manually install these plugins on each server, whereas with scount my understanding is it's 1 click installs?

If you don't want to set up graphite and don't mind paying for a service, I've really enjoyed using Scout. (http://scoutapp.com) Cron jobs report to their app every 3 minutes and they have very nice ad-hoc graphs. They also have some indispensable configurable triggers that have saved us multiple times.

Here at The Day Job we're using Scout(http://scoutapp.com) to monitor about 10 servers - it's pretty easy to set up, and grows well as your cluster does. You also get to write plugins in Ruby, which is pretty fun.

Looks interesting. How do you compare with Scout? https://scoutapp.com/

I've been very happy with Scout (http://scoutapp.com/) for monitoring. It's a nice mix of standard monitoring and a pretty simple plugin system for custom monitoring. All of the plugins are written in Ruby and the interface for reporting data is pretty simple. I'm using it for everything from monitoring the KB/s that systems are swapping (and alert if it's anything measurable) as well as custom things like job queue depths.

Also, no affiliation with these guys, I have been watching a company that has an interesting offering. If you run Rails, or can run a ruby script on your server, this offering looks very interesting: http://scoutapp.com/

I agree, New Relic's pricing model is almost too "enterprise". Per host pricing seems high, and difficult to scale. It's too bad, because I love everything else they offer. I'm even considering the new Insights service. I think they need to introduce a mid-tier pricing level between Free and Pro. They've got a good foothold in the market as a all-in-one solution. I've attempted to find a drop-in replacement, without much luck. It's difficult to find a one-for-one service, but here's some similar services with entry-level pricing: DataDog (https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/): $15/host/month up to 100 hosts. Scout (https://scoutapp.com/subscriptions): $10/host/month CopperEgg (http://copperegg.com/pricing/): A la carte depending on service Stackify (http://www.stackify.com/pricing/): $15/host/month The biggest feature that I need is application level monitoring for PHP. There's plenty of great server monitoring tools, but not many services that track application performance like New Relic does. I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time? Of course, I could be completely wrong, and missing a great alternative service.

Scout: https://scoutapp.com/

I tried Server Density and was really depressed by my experience. During my first couple of hours I encountered a ton of bugs, all of which I reported to SD. Some of them were UI issues — I would edit a chart's settings or an alert, and a minute later my changes had been reverted to the original one. Some of them were monitoring issues, with alerts showing up 45 minutes after the service went down (I was testing with a non-production setup), or not at all, or showing false positives and/or wrong values. And a good deal of SD was not well designed, eg. no monitoring templating. Also sad to see that plugins cost money; SD comes with very little functionality built in, so you have to rely on plugins. In general, the whole system seemed incredibly brittle. Not something I would trust a production system to. They have been running SD since 2009, but it feels like an alpha version; not a good sign. (That said, SD's response was very forthcoming.) I switched to Scout [1], which is not as visually pretty, but works and seems very sturdy. No bugs found so far. Integrates very well with Puppet, easy plugin development in languages like Ruby. Oh, and plugins are free. [1] http://scoutapp.com/

Scout Founder (Derek) here. Here's my (biased) quick take on the differences between New Relic and Scout plugins: * It looks like New Relic supports 2 types of plugins (1) direct integrations w/other SaaS services and (2) plugins you place directly on your servers. With Scout, you typically don't need to touch your servers to add plugins, but we don't support direct integrations w/other services (the actual plugins are run on your servers). So, if you're monitoring something server-side (like MySQL), Scout will feel easier. If you're pulling in data from another service (like MongoHQ), New Relic will feel easier. * New Relic supports Java and Ruby plugins, we just support Ruby. As a whole, Scout is more of a leaner approach to monitoring than New Relic. Plugins are a part of most monitoring products. It's really the experience that matters. I love well-maintained tools that just work, so our approach to a plugin system reflects that: * Gardening - Our plugin repo (https://github.com/scoutapp/scout-plugins) has 1000+ commits from 45 authors. We work hard to make sure plugins work, even when they weren't originally created by us. All of our plugins are open-source, so anyone can submit a pull request. * One language (Ruby) - Why do we only support Ruby? (1) It's an easy scripting language to grasp (2) we know Ruby very well, so when something breaks, we can fix it 95% of the time vs. having to wait for the plugin author to address it. If you've ever browsed through…

I just tried out the main product and while it's easy to setup i ran into snags with the plugins right away. Both redis and postgres (the first two i tried) failed to install and it took a bit of searching to figure out they had their own dependencies. When trying to install those dependencies i ran into issues with compatibility for a fresh ruby install. Maybe you should concentrate on fixing your own dependency issues before you start pounding on Nagios (https://scoutapp.com/info/nagios_alternative) about the exact same issue.

Here's what we use at http://leanpub.com * Servers: AWS * Code Hosting: GitHub * Mail Sending: Postmark (http://postmarkapp.com) * Monitoring: Scout (http://scoutapp.com/) * Sharing files with our authors: Dropbox * Error notification: AirBrake (https://airbrakeapp.com/) * File Hosting: S3 * Mail: Google Apps * Cartoon Animal Videos: Xtranormal (http://www.xtranormal.com/) * Payments: PayPal * Project Planning / Todos: Pivotal Tracker

I'm guessing it's actually a free plan, despite the "30 day trial" text. I'm guessing it's a humongous typo. When you sign up for the priced plans the sign up form asks for credit card info and promises 30 days free. The "Free" link goes to this sign up form: https://scoutapp.com/accounts/new?subscription_id=2 which doesn't ask for any contact details, and clearly shows the price as $0.00. Besides, I don't think the guys running Scout would refer to their service as freemium on their blog if they didn't have a free version. Their help link at the bottom of the website is also broken ( http://scoutapp.com/info/help ), which means the the website probably hasn't been tested/proofread very carefully (understandably -- there's so much to do).

Yeah this isn't freemium at all according to the pricing plans here: http://scoutapp.com/subscriptions Evernote is a much better example of a freemium model.

It is really hard to notice but on this page: http://scoutapp.com/subscriptions there is note of a 30 day free plan if you look (or search) but you don't get the same kind of information as you do on the other plans. We also offer a 30-day free plan: 1 server, 3 plugins, and a 30 minute reporting interval.