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Setting Up AppSignal Monitoring for a Ruby on Rails Application


Milica Maksimović and Stefan Verkerk on

As we're doing our best to make monitoring easy, we've wanted to make more content that would really show and not just tell you how easy it is to set up monitoring with AppSignal.
We've been collaborating with Leigh Hallday on making this video for you that will show you everything you need to know about the setup process. We'll be posting more videos like this on our YouTube channel, so you should subscribe to it if you'd like to get notifications about future videos. You know how that works 😉
What's In the Video
In this video, Leigh will show you how easy it is to integrate AppSignal into a Rails application. He covers installation and setup, how to troubleshoot and fix performance issues, specifically showing a common use-case with N+1 queries.
The N+1 query anti-pattern happens when a query is executed for every single result of a previous query. The query count is N + 1, where N is the number of queries for every result of the initial query. Now if that initial query has one result, then N+1 = 2. If it has 1000 results, N+1 = 1001 queries 🙀. It's easy to spot them, Leigh will show you how.
He'll then show you AppSignal's Sidekiq integration along with its magic dashboard, which can really help pinpoint performance issues. The whole process is automated as Sidekiq is detected during setup, and things like throughput, duration per job and queue length are plotted on their own graphs. That way you can see when peak, and set up alerting and fix issues with as little work as possible.
Monitoring Made Easy And Sweet 🍪
Hope you enjoyed the video! If you'd like us to cover more topics in this format feel free to reach out and let us know. We can promise you a free box of stroopwafels if your suggestion gets accepted.
If you haven't used AppSignal before, now you know how we save you time by making monitoring easier. You can try us out for 30 days free of charge 😀
Wondering what you can do next?
Finished this article? Here are a few more things you can do:
- Try out AppSignal with a 30-day free trial.
- Reach out to our support team with any feedback or questions.
- Share this article on social media
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Milica Maksimović

Stefan Verkerk
Stefan often shares stories about his Mosaic script-kiddie years. Has been scaling startups since the 90s. Today, he does management and growth things at AppSignal. Has amazing Excel to SQL chops on his customized MacBook.
All articles by Stefan VerkerkBecome our next author!
AppSignal monitors your apps
AppSignal provides insights for Ruby, Rails, Elixir, Phoenix, Node.js, Express and many other frameworks and libraries. We are located in beautiful Amsterdam. We love stroopwafels. If you do too, let us know. We might send you some!
