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AppSignal vs Scout: What are the differences?

Introduction AppSignal and Scout are both popular monitoring tools used by developers to track and analyze the performance of their applications. However, there are key differences between the two that developers should consider before choosing one for their projects.

  1. Monitoring Capabilities: AppSignal excels in providing detailed insights into the performance of web applications, offering robust monitoring of system metrics, error tracking, and performance bottlenecks. On the other hand, Scout focuses more on application monitoring, offering customizable dashboards, anomaly detection, and in-depth transaction monitoring for better visibility into application performance.

  2. Integrations: AppSignal supports a wide range of integrations with popular frameworks and services such as Ruby on Rails, Elixir, and Heroku, making it easy to set up monitoring for different types of applications. In contrast, Scout offers integrations with tools like AWS, Docker, and GitHub, focusing on providing a comprehensive monitoring solution across different infrastructure and services.

  3. Alerting Mechanisms: AppSignal's alerting system allows developers to set up custom notifications based on predefined thresholds for different metrics, ensuring timely alerts for potential issues affecting the application. Scout, on the other hand, offers advanced alerting capabilities with features like anomaly detection and customizable alert conditions for more granular control over monitoring alerts.

  4. Data Visualization: AppSignal provides visually appealing dashboards with detailed charts and graphs for quick analysis of application performance data, helping developers easily spot trends and anomalies. Scout offers customizable dashboards with various visualization options, allowing developers to create personalized views of their monitoring data for better insights.

  5. Cost Structure: AppSignal's pricing is based on the number of tracked hosts and additional features, making it a scalable option for small to large applications with a pay-as-you-go model. In contrast, Scout offers a flat-rate pricing model based on the number of monitored servers, making it suitable for teams looking for a simple and predictable pricing structure without the need to track additional features separately.

  6. Community Support: AppSignal has a thriving community of developers and support resources, including documentation, tutorials, and forums, making it easy for users to get help and share knowledge about monitoring best practices. Scout also offers community support through documentation and support channels, ensuring users have access to resources and assistance when setting up and using the monitoring tool.

In Summary, while AppSignal excels in providing detailed system metrics and error tracking, Scout focuses more on application monitoring with customizable dashboards and advanced alerting mechanisms, making it a flexible choice for developers looking for a comprehensive monitoring solution.

Decisions about AppSignal and Scout
Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 3 upvotes · 214.1K views

Coming from a Ruby background, we've been users of New Relic for quite some time. When we adopted Elixir, the New Relic integration was young and missing essential features, so we gave AppSignal a try. It worked for quite some time, we even implemented a :telemetry reporter for AppSignal . But it was difficult to correlate data in two monitoring solutions, New Relic was undergoing a UI overhaul which made it difficult to use, and AppSignal was missing the flexibility we needed. We had some fans of Datadog, so we gave it a try and it worked out perfectly. Datadog works great with Ruby , Elixir , JavaScript , and has powerful features our engineers love to use (notebooks, dashboards, very flexible alerting). Cherry on top - thanks to the Datadog Terraform provider everything is written as code, allowing us to collaborate on our Datadog setup.

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Pros of AppSignal
Pros of Scout
  • 15
    Easy setup
  • 8
    Logs Errors
  • 7
    Tracks performance
  • 7
    Elixir support out of the box
  • 7
    Support Elixir
  • 6
    Profiles Ruby Memory Usage
  • 5
    In App Customer support via chat
  • 5
    Great UI
  • 4
    Affordable, holistic, All-in-One solution for Rails
  • 4
    Custom metrics
  • 4
    GIT Integration
  • 4
    Cheapest option
  • 4
    Anomaly detection
  • 8
    Easy setup
  • 5
    Plugins
  • 3
    Affordable
  • 1
    Custom Scopes
  • 1
    GIT Integration
  • 1
    Local Developer Tracing
  • 1
    Profiles Ruby Memory Usage
  • 1
    Heroku Integration

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What is AppSignal?

AppSignal gives you and your team alerts and detailed metrics about your Ruby, Node.js or Elixir application. Sensible pricing, no aggressive sales & support by developers.

What is Scout?

Scout APM helps developers quickly pinpoint & resolve performance issues before the customer ever sees them. Spend less time debugging & more time building with a streamlined interface & tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code.

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Blog Posts

Oct 24 2019 at 7:43PM

AppSignal

JavaScriptNode.jsJava+8
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What are some alternatives to AppSignal and Scout?
New Relic
The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.
Sentry
Sentry’s Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health.
Skylight
Skylight is a smart profiler for your Rails apps that visualizes request performance across all of your servers.
Datadog
Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
OpenCensus
It is a set of libraries for various languages that allow you to collect application metrics and distributed traces, then transfer the data to a backend of your choice in real time. This data can be analyzed by developers and admins to understand the health of the application and debug problems.
See all alternatives