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7 Application Performance Metrics Worth Measuring

Take an all too common situation, where sales submits a high priority ticket to the development team that''s a blocker for an enterprise deal coming through the pipeline. This blocker/feature requires a database query that is suspected to slow page speed for some customers, but the developer(s) isn't 100% certain when these instances occur or if the difference is more than negligible.

This is where a team can leverage an APM system to quicken development times without neglecting performance. With an APM system, developers can deploy their code and watch for changes in performance. If a newly released feature is causing performance issues, the team can go back and address these as needed. Reducing premature optimization and increasing feature deployments.

How to Use Docker''s Health Check

A Health Check means to check the health of any resource to determine whether that resource is operating normally. Here, it is about checking the health of Docker containers. 

If you've been using docker containers in production, you might have noticed that docker checks the status of a container by using the status of the process (PID) launched from the Docker file command. If the process is running successfully, the container is considered healthy.

Identifying Memory Bloat Video

In this video, we are going to take a look at what memory bloat is, what causes it, and how you can use Scout to eliminate it from your applications.

Memory related performance issues have the potential to bring your entire application down, and yet, most APMs completely ignore this fact and fail to provide any useful way of monitoring memory usage at all. At Scout, we understand the importance of memory monitoring, and have added many useful features throughout our APM tool to help give you the visibility and peace of mind that you need.

9 Most Popular PHP Frameworks for Developers

Web development before the age of web frameworks is difficult to imagine. Setting up a robust, dependable web app from scratch is a daunting task that requires years of knowledge and experience. Nowadays, however, with the help of effective, easy to use web frameworks, it doesn't take more than a few minutes to get going. All it now takes is a bunch of terminal commands to set up the scaffolding of your project - including a clean folder structure, a flexible API, a development environment with installed dependencies, utility libraries, testing functionalities and so much more.

PHP web frameworks make it significantly easier to develop PHP web applications. Their purpose is to allow developers to lay a solid, functional foundation that their apps can benefit from. 

Containers or VMs: Which Should You Choose?

Both containers and virtual machines are virtual environments that comprise a number of computing components and are independent in nature, thereby allowing developers to scale applications in isolated runtimes. Both of these concepts aim at providing independent sets of resources to individual computing environments to ensure quick and reliable application performance. However, even though containers and virtual machines both facilitate the more efficient use of resources, the two differ in a lot of aspects. In the article below we'll walk through an overview of each, and then take a deeper dive into the differences that set these virtual environments apart.

Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Deployment 

In recent years, the practices of continuous integration and continuous deployment have gained tremendous popularity, due to their idea of automating the building, testing, and deployment pipelines to minimize delays in software production. While automation mainly addresses problems that may arise from merging (sometimes) faulty code from multiple collaborators on the developer side, it also improves the overall experience of the end-users and relevant stakeholders, for reasons which will be explained thoroughly below. The sheer significance of these two practices gave birth to the acronym "CI/CD", which you may have come across. CI refers to continuous integration, while CD may refer to either continuous deployment or continuous delivery, the former being the more common one. 

How to Use PHP Include and Require Statements

In the realms of computer science and software engineering, reusability, and modularity are considered to be important design principles to keep in mind when building software programs. The key idea behind these principles is to write code in a way that does not concentrate all its operations in one place.

It is therefore advocated to break down your code into several smaller, atomic parts that are independent, reusable and replaceable. This makes projects easier to debug, reduces redundancy, saves an awful lot of memory and resources, and allows for localized, thus more stable updates.

A Guide to Python Lambda Functions

In Python, Lambda functions are rare compared to "normal" functions, and occasionally misunderstood or overused.

In this article we'll cover what Lambda functions are, how to use them, and how they compare with normal functions and other alternatives. We'll also touch on the history of lambda functions, such as where the name "lambda" came from and why Python's creator Guido van Rossum wanted to remove them.

Node.js Logging: A How-to Guide

Logging is the practice of keeping track of events that take place over the course of your application's life. It allows you to record important information about its execution to keep track of its correctness, accuracy, quality, and overall performance.

Logging plays an integral role throughout the whole pipeline of any software application: from development to testing to releasing for production, a well-implemented logging system allows you to understand the various aspects of your application's performance.

Django and the N+1 Queries Problem

The N+1 Queries Problem is a perennial database performance issue. It affects many ORM's and custom SQL code, and Django's ORM is not immune either.

In this post, we'll examine what the N+1 Queries Problem looks like in Django, some tools for fixing it, and most importantly some tools for detecting it. Naturally, Scout is one of those tools, with its built-in N+1 Insights tool.

Serverless vs. Containers: Key Differences Explained

The "as a service" business model continues to grow rapidly, largely thanks to the rise of cloud computing. "As a service" offerings deliver IT products and technologies such as software, hardware, and data storage to consumers via the Internet, rather than having to install or manage them themselves.

Serverless and containers are two such "as a service" technologies that have seen increasing adoption in recent years. In this article, we'll explain the difference between serverless and containers, so that you can understand for which situations each technology is best suited.

The Most Popular Python Web Frameworks in 2020

Web frameworks are powerful tools. They abstract the common aspects of building web sites and APIs and allow us to build richer, more stable applications with less effort.

A broad range of web frameworks is available to us in Python. Some are proven favorites with large ecosystems and communities. Others excel in niche use cases or for specific kinds of development. Still, others are up-and-comers with compelling new reasons to be considered.

How to Create a Python Stack

This blog post covers what stacks are and will help you understand more about them by comparing them with other familiar data structures.

We'll also look at the three different ways of implementing stacks using Python and discuss the nuts and bolts of each approach and the different situations in which each of them would make the right choice for your application.

How to Enable PHP Error Reporting

Most errors in PHP are by default not reported. This might be helpful for web applications in production, where you don't want users to come across obscure error messages. However, during development, it is imperative to enable error messages - to be alerted about potential inaccuracies in your code before it is released for production.

In this post, we will look at what an error in PHP is, the different types of errors, and how you can enable error reporting in PHP.

Better Python Decorators with Wrapt

We value the correctness of our instrumentation a lot so that we do not affect our users' applications. It's important that our decorators are as transparent as possible, so they do not break assumptions held by the library or application. Therefore, we create our decorators with the wrapt library by Graham Dumpleton.

wrapt makes writing correct, transparent decorators easy. If you are writing any kind of decorators in Python, you should consider using wrapt.

The $5B DevOps Stranglehold

The "Big 5" companies control over $5 Billion in DevOps spending.

We are here to tell you there are alternatives for those of us who are not among the world's top 500 companies. There is a new breed of vendors who care about users, who build beloved products, who charge a reasonable price and back it up with fanatical service.

PHP Memory Leaks, How to Find and Fix Them

Memory leaks can happen in any language, including PHP. These memory leaks may happen in small increments that take time to accumulate, or in larger jumps that manifest quickly ...

A Tour of 7 Popular Ruby Frameworks in 2020

Deciding which Ruby framework to use on your project is an important decision with long-lasting effects. It's important to consider the needs of the application as well as any future plans or ambitions, as one option may be better suited than another over the long term.

Figure out which one is right for your needs with the link below!
 

PHP Control Flow: Loop Types and Conditional Statements Explained

In this post, we'll look at the different ways in which we can leverage these various control structures in PHP.

We'll look at different types of loops and conditional statements, and explore how we can use them in defining logic for our code.

How to Convert a String to a Number in PHP

In this guide, we'll cover how to: 

• Convert a String to a Number Using Type Casting
• Convert a String to a Number Using intval()
• Convert a String to a Number Using Mathematical Operations
• Formatting Number Strings Using number_format()