Best Ruby Application Monitoring Tools in 2023

Application Performance Monitoring allows developers to monitor and analyze the performance of any Ruby or Ruby-based framework project. It collects key data about the performance issues and trends, bottlenecks, and also unexpected behavior of the application and provides actionable insights in a human-readable manner.

Many APM solutions are available as a part of bigger SaaS observability suites, but there are also a lot of standalone, language-specific tools ranging from lightweight code profilers and powerful open-source solutions. Let's take a look at some of the Best Ruby Application Performance Monitoring Tools in 2023.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack offers a structured log management platform based on ClickHouse. It allows you to start collecting, analyzing, and visualizing logs in real-time. Better Stack easily collects data directly from any Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, and plain Ruby project. Better Stack's advanced built-in collaboration features, resource-efficient ClickHouse, and visually pleasing, dark-mode UI help you to spend less time debugging and focus on shipping higher-quality software faster.

Better Stack Logs is a part of the Better Stack ecosystem, and together with Better Stack Uptime, they create a complete observability solution with incident management built-in. With one-click Better Uptime integration, you can easily alert on-call team members of any irregularities in your application's behavior. Be it a specific log message error or a predefined usage trend.

2. Raygun

Raygun offers real-time data about the performance of any application. It detects, diagnoses, and helps to resolve issues.

Raygun monitors errors and reports on crashes. It also provides Real User Monitoring, which collects data about real user experience and behavior and provides code-level insights into the performance of the application on the backend.

3. AppOptics

Solarwinds offers multiple operation-specific APM tools, such as SAM or AppOptics. AppOptics offers on-prem, hybrid, and cloud-based, distributed applications monitoring. It combines dashboards to visualize metrics from application and infrastructure in one place and eventually offers consolidated monitoring for all server, host, containers, and serverless environments.

SolarWinds' AppOptics also offers Application Performance Monitoring for Java, .Net, Python, PHP, Scala, Node.js, and Go applications.

4. New Relic

New Relic offers a complete monitoring solution covering APM, K8s monitoring, ML Model Monitoring, Log Management, Synthetics, etc. Their Application Performance Monitoring helps to navigate and visualize the entire application stack, and it offers most of the features necessary for reliable and continuous APM.

5. Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers Ruby monitoring on the process level. Dynatrace's all-in-one monitoring solution also offers an APM tool for automated observability for cloud-native services. It offers automatic discovery and mapping, end-to-end observability, multiplatform app monitoring, and root-cause and impacts analysis.

It's a feature-packed, enterprise-ready monitoring solution, which often makes it quite pricey and painful to start with.

6. Retrace

Stackify's Retrace offers basic and advanced Application Performance Monitoring features, capable of collecting and monitoring logs or tracking deployments. Retrace uses lightweight profiling to automatically track essential methods in code and fetches detailed performance data. Retrace can track key performance issues such as slow dependencies, queries, requests, and re-occurring errors.

7. Sensu Go

Sensu Go is an open-source application monitoring solution written in Go. It offers support for servers, services, and application health monitoring. It's an observability pipeline allowing for the centralization and management monitoring tools for better observability. Sensu Go offers a monitoring-as-a-Code solution allowing for code configuration file sharing, modification, revision, and versioning. Sensu Go also automatically handles monitoring of multi-cloud environments.

8. Sentry

Sentry's performance monitoring offers support for various application languages and frameworks and is available both as a SaaS and Self-hosted platform.

Sentry offers end-to-end distributed trace monitoring to trace performance issues to their origin.

9. Datadog

Datadog is one of the most popular and successful monitoring solutions available. Datadog's APM tool monitors apps across browsers, platforms, databases, or lines of code. It works well with frontend and backend monitoring data and reports on performance-related issues, dependencies, health, and business metrics.

Datadog works best as a part of the full Datadog stack, is enterprise-ready, and belongs among the most expensive solutions available.

10. Elastic APM

Elastic APM automatically sets up error logging and performance tracking by their elastic gem.

Elastic APM is built upon the ELK stack. It's composed of open source libraries for collecting performance data, a server, receiving performance data, Elasticsearch, and Kibana for visualization.

11. ScoutAPM

ScoutAPM monitors the performance of the Ruby on Rails application using the scout Ruby gem. It automatically monitors the performance of controller actions, records transaction traces, and instruments many Ruby libraries, including ActiveRecord, Net::HTTP, or Redis.

ScoutAPM also supports Ruby frameworks such as Sinatra, Delayed Job, Resque, and Sneakers.

12. Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting set of tools built by SoundCloud's engineers in 2012. It was the second CNCF project after Kubernetes, and it has managed to obtain a large and vibrant community of contributors and users ever since.

13. Atatus

Atatus offers instant insight into Ruby applications and frameworks. It enables end-to-end visibility, API failure monitoring, tracking application errors and exceptions, tracing transactions, monitoring external requests, database performance, and much more.

Atatus also offers auto instrumentation for the most popular frameworks, enables smart notifications, compare the impact of different code versions, and is fully scalable.

14. SigNoz

SigNoz offers OpenTelemetry as the primary approach to instrumentation. It supports Python and some Python Frameworks, such as Django. It runs on either Kafka+Druid or OLAP database ClickHouse for the backend. The Query service is built-in GO, and the frontend is Typescript-powered.

SigNoz offers a broad and vibrant community of contributors and well-written, holistic documentation.

Conclusion

Nowadays, APM is essential for delivering a reliable and successful microservices-based application in a sustainable fashion. Open source solutions allow developers to create custom, project-specific add-ons, and plugins and manage infrastructure costs but at the same time create another thing to maintain compared to SaaS solutions.