Trying and loving Scout

I recently found Scout on a blog post (somewhere I can’t find again to link to!), and thought I’d try it out on my Scottish Football Archive website.

To my surprise, it was easy to install on my shared hosting, easy to setup and great to use.

Monitoring my Rails applications has always been something I am interested in learning more about, and how to use the statistics generated to make my application more efficient, as this is the step which always confuses me - I have a lot of data about performance, requests, timings, but what do I do with them?!?

Scout doesn’t help me do this (although it does have pretty graphs!) but it does focus me on learning more about this subject.

I’m currently hosting my apps at Rails Playground for $5 a month, and although this is fantastic in terms of price (and most definitely service!), only a few days on Scout has shown me that my application is suffering due to being on a small hosting package, so it’s time for an upgrade…