Owning your server stack shouldn't be a source of anxiety. Unfortunately, it often is, especially if you only pay attention to the problems you can feel in your gut: Is the app running? Is it throwing exceptions? Does it seem fast enough? These are great intuitive measurements, but just as a doctor uses diagnostics to catch high blood pressure before it becomes a crisis, you need deeper visibility to detect memory leaks, CPU spikes, and disk consumption before they bring your project to a halt.
Hatchbox and AppSignal give you that "deeper visibility." They simplify infrastructure management by replacing manual monitoring with automated, real-time feedback. Together, they transform complex data into actionable insights and make server management accessible to any developer. This gives you the diagnostic depth you’d expect from a much larger operation, without the overhead cost.
What AppSignal Captures at the Host Level
Hatchbox is built to coordinate and manage your Ruby on Rails servers, providing high-level observability for your cluster. To offer greater insights, it has teamed up with AppSignal through a seamless integration. This partnership takes you from manual dashboard monitoring to automated instrumentation, historical trend analysis, alerting, and in-depth metrics all within the context of your application.
When you add the AppSignal gem to your app, you get access to both APM (Application Performance Monitoring) measurements and server-level instrumentation. This includes load average, CPU/memory usage, network traffic, and disk I/O. The table below breaks down how these two layers of visibility work together:
Server-level App-level (APM) Provider Hatchbox/Host, AppSignal AppSignal Focus Infrastructure & hardware Code & business logic Visibility "Is the server up?" "Is the /checkout route slow?" Typical data Load avg, memory %, disk I/O Throughput, error rates, traces
Unlike other services, AppSignal doesn't require a separate tool or daemon; everything is built into the AppSignal gem. The Hatchbox integration enables you to connect your stack in just two clicks, after which you can view real-time insights within Hatchbox or jump directly into AppSignal to debug.
Reading the Host Dashboard
To see the host-level measurements captured by AppSignal, you'll need to navigate to the Host metrics page first. You can find that navigation item under Host monitoring. Once there, click the specific host you're interested in. Alternatively, you can click the specific host listed under the Worst 10 hosts by section within the Overview dashboard.
Host metrics via the Dashboard
... continue reading