And it's a go! After many months of hard work and incorporating feedback from about fifty early adopters, we're officially launching AppSignal for Elixir today. It's the first fully featured platform providing error tracking and performance insights for Elixir and Phoenix applications.
Why we chose Elixir
AppSignal grew out of an agency that loved and worked with Ruby and Rails since 2005. AppSignal was born on a Friday afternoon, and what started as a side-project is now one of the leading monitoring services for teams using Ruby. We currently monitor over 30 billion requests a month for our Ruby customers.
Last year, we noticed a new language and associated framework gain popularity, and we felt as excited as we did in 2005. No one else had built a consolidated exception tracking and performance monitoring platform for Elixir yet. Exception trackers were starting to support it, but for errors only. New Relic told people to build something on top of their SDK, which lead to an open source project without official support. We already had this fully featured product for Ruby apps, and decided it was time for a new horse to bet on.
So we decided to build AppSignal for Elixir.
Getting to the launch
Luckily, by the end of 2014, we already knew we wanted to support more languages in the future. It took us over half a year to port all the heavy lifting from the Ruby gem to a native library written in Rust. That way we "only" had to build language integrations later.
Even though our Rust library was ready, we still needed intimate knowledge of a language like Elixir to both integrate with it and be able to deliver A+ technical support. Plus, we wanted to support all features that our Ruby integration offers as well. To make sure we got it right from the start, we partnered with Arjan Scherpenisse, a 10-year Erlang veteran. He helped us with our proof of concept, after which our team built upon that foundation. Phoenix support, Channels, porting installation/demo/diagnose tasks, and much more; let's say it was a fairly large undertaking. Luckily, dozens of beta users gave us feedback and expressed their excitement for AppSignal.
Launch day
Today marks the moment where for us, it all comes together. The amazing Elixir language, its awesome international community, and the ability to provide amazing insights into the workings of our Elixir apps. Elixir customers are now able to use AppSignal and get:
- Error catching, so you can squash nasty bugs
- Performance tracking, to find slow requests and speed them up
- Host monitoring, to keep an eye on CPU, Disk, network and more
- Custom metrics collection, to visualise any metric you want
- Workflow features, to make you and your team as productive as possible.
Tonight, at our launch event in Amsterdam, we officially open AppSignal for Elixir for business. If you want to try it yourself, sign up for a free 30 day trial.
