Scout APM's blog, from the Scout monitoring service, covers server and application monitoring for Rails, Django, and Ruby.
HN commenters recommend Scout as simple server monitoring, praising easy install, useful plugins, and responsive support, often as a Nagios alternative.
Scout Founder (Derek) here.
Here's my (biased) quick take on the differences between New Relic and Scout plugins:
* It looks like New Relic supports 2 types of plugins (1) direct integrations w/other SaaS services and (2) plugins you place directly on your servers. With Scout, you typically don't need to touch your servers to add plugins, but we don't support direct integrations w/other services (the actual plugins are run on your servers). So, if you're monitoring something server-side (like MySQL), Scout will feel easier. If you're pulling in data from another service (like MongoHQ), New Relic will feel easier.
* New Relic supports Java and Ruby plugins, we just support Ruby.
As a whole, Scout is more of a leaner approach to monitoring than New Relic.
Plugins are a part of most monitoring products. It's really the experience that matters. I love well-maintained tools that just work, so our approach to a plugin system reflects that:
* Gardening - Our plugin repo (https://github.com/scoutapp/scout-plugins) has 1000+ commits from 45 authors. We work hard to make sure plugins work, even when they weren't originally created by us. All of our plugins are open-source, so anyone can submit a pull request.
* One language (Ruby) - Why do we only support Ruby? (1) It's an easy scripting language to grasp (2) we know Ruby very well, so when something breaks, we can fix it 95% of the time vs. having to wait for the plugin author to address it. If you've ever browsed through…
I tried Server Density and was really depressed by my experience.
During my first couple of hours I encountered a ton of bugs, all of which I reported to SD. Some of them were UI issues — I would edit a chart's settings or an alert, and a minute later my changes had been reverted to the original one. Some of them were monitoring issues, with alerts showing up 45 minutes after the service went down (I was testing with a non-production setup), or not at all, or showing false positives and/or wrong values. And a good deal of SD was not well designed, eg. no monitoring templating.
Also sad to see that plugins cost money; SD comes with very little functionality built in, so you have to rely on plugins.
In general, the whole system seemed incredibly brittle. Not something I would trust a production system to. They have been running SD since 2009, but it feels like an alpha version; not a good sign. (That said, SD's response was very forthcoming.)
I switched to Scout [1], which is not as visually pretty, but works and seems very sturdy. No bugs found so far. Integrates very well with Puppet, easy plugin development in languages like Ruby. Oh, and plugins are free.
[1] http://scoutapp.com/
I agree, New Relic's pricing model is almost too "enterprise". Per host pricing seems high, and difficult to scale. It's too bad, because I love everything else they offer. I'm even considering the new Insights service. I think they need to introduce a mid-tier pricing level between Free and Pro.
They've got a good foothold in the market as a all-in-one solution. I've attempted to find a drop-in replacement, without much luck. It's difficult to find a one-for-one service, but here's some similar services with entry-level pricing:
DataDog (https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/): $15/host/month up to 100 hosts.
Scout (https://scoutapp.com/subscriptions): $10/host/month
CopperEgg (http://copperegg.com/pricing/): A la carte depending on service
Stackify (http://www.stackify.com/pricing/): $15/host/month
The biggest feature that I need is application level monitoring for PHP. There's plenty of great server monitoring tools, but not many services that track application performance like New Relic does.
I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time?
Of course, I could be completely wrong, and missing a great alternative service.
I'm guessing it's actually a free plan, despite the "30 day trial" text. I'm guessing it's a humongous typo.
When you sign up for the priced plans the sign up form asks for credit card info and promises 30 days free. The "Free" link goes to this sign up form: https://scoutapp.com/accounts/new?subscription_id=2 which doesn't ask for any contact details, and clearly shows the price as $0.00.
Besides, I don't think the guys running Scout would refer to their service as freemium on their blog if they didn't have a free version. Their help link at the bottom of the website is also broken ( http://scoutapp.com/info/help ), which means the the website probably hasn't been tested/proofread very carefully (understandably -- there's so much to do).
I just tried out the main product and while it's easy to setup i ran into snags with the plugins right away. Both redis and postgres (the first two i tried) failed to install and it took a bit of searching to figure out they had their own dependencies. When trying to install those dependencies i ran into issues with compatibility for a fresh ruby install.
Maybe you should concentrate on fixing your own dependency issues before you start pounding on Nagios (https://scoutapp.com/info/nagios_alternative) about the exact same issue.
These tools are great for looking at what's happening now if you're logged into the server.
They're complemented by monitoring products like:
Self hosted:
- Nagios (already mentioned in the post)
- Cacti / Munin
Hosted:
- http://www.serverdensity.com (tool my company produces)
- http://www.cloudkick.com (monitoring + cloud infrastructure management)
- http://www.scoutapp.com
these give you similar metrics plus various other things like alerting, graphs, mobile apps, etc.