And it's a go! After many months of hard work and incorporating feedback from about fifty early adopters, we're officially launching "AppSignal for Elixir" tonight. It's the first fully featured platform providing error tracking and performance insights for Elixir and Phoenix applications.
So, why Elixir you may ask? In 2005, AppSignal co-founders Thijs and myself started 80beans, one of the first European Ruby consultancies. Rails was at version 0.12, and only a handful –arguably insane– companies were using Ruby on Rails for large production apps. But we loved the language and the community, grew with the platform and the market, and became one of the leading Ruby consultancies in Western Europe. This evolved into AppSignal, the platform we're now focused on full-time with a team of seven people. With Ruby, we bet on the right horse.
Last year, we saw a new language and associated framework gain popularity, and we felt as excited as we did in 2005. No one else had built a consolidated exception tracking and performance monitoring platform for Elixir yet. Exception trackers were starting to support it, but for errors only. New Relic told people to build something on top of their SDK, which lead to an open source project without official support. We already had this fully featured product for Ruby apps, and decided it was time for a new horse to bet on.
Luckily, by the end of 2014, we already knew we wanted to support more languages in the future. It took us over half a year to port all the heavy lifting from the Ruby gem to a native library written in Rust. That way we "only" had to build integrations later. That turned out to be true, though you still need intimate knowledge of a language to both integrate with it and be able to deliver A+ technical support (which kind of limited the speed at which we could move). Plus, we wanted to support all features that our Ruby integration offers as well.
Today marks the moment where for us, it all comes together. The amazing language, its awesome international community, and the ability to provide amazing insights into the workings of our Elixir apps. Coupled with hardware insights, custom metrics, and a whole bunch of workflow features we're pretty happy with the end result (and since every end is a beginning, we'll be constantly working on adding and improving features across all integrations). For pricing, we decided to keep it simple: we only charge for requests and we don't care about number of hosts or which languages you're using. Pay once, and combine as many Ruby and Elixir apps as you wish.
Thanks for helping us build awesome stuff! If you have any questions or feedback, make sure to let me know. As always, Product Hunters get 10% off for a year with coupon "producthunt" (surprise!).
Alright, I'm off to the races, looking for a horse to bet on next...
Developer Dilemmas