AppSignal Intelligence Just Got More Rails Context

Today we’re taking our partnership with Chris Oliver (founder of Hatchbox and GoRails) one step further.

With AppSignal, you can already store enriched telemetry about your applications, services, and infrastructure, along with your user context, in your AppSignal context store. You can use that context store for traditional observability reporting and workflows, or connect it to your agents over MCP or the CLI.

AppSignal’s context store is what our Intelligence features are built on. With help from Chris and Collin from GoRails, we’ve added a new layer of expert context to the platform.

Meet Chris Oliver

Chris has been publishing GoRails since 2014. Alongside it he builds Jumpstart Pro, a Rails SaaS template, and Hatchbox, which has run more than two million deploys since 2016. He also co-hosts the Remote Ruby podcast.

Gems he maintains sit in the dependency trees of a lot of Rails apps: noticed for notifications, madmin for admin interfaces, and receipts for invoicing. See the rest on his GitHub.

Chris knows the realities of running Rails in production. We already wrote about how Hatchbox is built to solve real problems for Rails developers. When we set out to give humans and agents better context for reducing time to resolution, he was the obvious person to ask.

10 Tutorials, Made with GoRails

Our docs now include 10 Ruby and Rails tutorials. Some of the series is brand new: written by Chris and Collin for AppSignal users. The rest comes from GoRails, brought into our docs as extra context and explainers.

A good place to begin is with our brand new tutorial: installing and configuring AppSignal in a Rails app. The other nine cover the tools that produce the data you end up monitoring: Solid Queue, Mission Control Jobs, batching background jobs, the debug gem, params.expect, parameters with defaults, impersonation, local CI, and the Rails 8.1 Markdown renderer.

These aren’t AppSignal guides. Our guides explain how to use AppSignal: installing it, configuring it, reading what it collects. The tutorials explain the Ruby and Rails tools underneath, which is how we turn Chris and Collin’s years of experience into context for AppSignal.

What’s documented is what they teach, published under our URLs, in the same docs as everything else our Intelligence features read.

For Developers, and the Agents They Use

Each tutorial pairs a video with a written walkthrough and transcript, so you (or your agent) can work through it however suits.

The written half matches how we write agent install instructions: requirements in a table, steps in order, and a clear finish line for each step. That shape is deliberate. Every docs page also ships as plain Markdown (append .md to the URL), shows up in our llms.txt index, and lands in a full llms-full.txt bundle. That is what an agent reads. All our docs are also available in a single llms.txt file.

One page for both, rather than a human page and an agent copy that drift apart by the second edit. Hand your agent https://docs.appsignal.com/tutorials/ruby/solid-queue.md and it gets the same walkthrough you do. Our own Intelligence agents read these pages, and so does any agent you build and point at the docs yourself.

If you want to point an agent at AppSignal yourself:

• Set up AppSignal with a coding agent
• Browse the docs index for agents (llms.txt)
• Download the full docs (llms-full.txt)

The install tutorial makes the same point from the other end: it links straight out to those agent instructions, so you can watch Chris do it or hand the whole job over.

Where necessary, we made small edits to accommodate changes in Rails that shipped after the videos were produced.

What’s Next

This week we’re at Rails World 2026 in Austin, Texas. The AppSignal team will be there, and we’ll publish more of the Intelligence work behind this story as the week goes on.

Want a topic covered in more depth? Request it in Discord or drop us an email. For more on the Intelligence features we’re building, follow along in AppSignal Labs.