It’s easy to get lost with dozens of plugins and frameworks when starting a new project that requires basic authentication and authorization capabilities. It doesn’t have to be that way. In this article, we’re going to explore two valuable Node.js packages — Passport and CASL — that can help you boost the security of your application by providing both authentication and authorization functionality.

In today’s post, we’ll dive into how we, at AppSignal, solved a daunting engineering challenge. Giving you a look into the kitchen, this post will show you how we tested a new database in production without having to worry about errors/downtime. Alright, let’s get cooking!

Setting up a proper monitoring overview over your application’s performance is a complex task. Normally, you’d first need to figure out what you need to monitor, then instrument your code, and finally make sense of all the data that has been emitted. However, with a few things set in place, and an APM that natively supports Ruby, it’s easier than ever to take this step. In this post, we’ll show you how you can do it too.

Regardless of the tech stack used, many developers have already used Redis or, at least, heard of it. Redis is specifically known for providing distributed caching mechanisms for cluster-based applications. While this is true, it’s not its only purpose. Redis is a powerful and versatile in-memory database. Powerful because it is incredibly super fast. Versatile because it can handle caching, database-like features, session management, real-time analytics, event streaming, etc.

ActiveRecord is Ruby on Rails’ most magical feature. We don’t usually need to worry about its inner workings, but when we do, here’s how AppSignal can help us know what’s going on under the hood.

When building a production application, you are usually on the lookout for ways to optimize its performance while keeping any possible trade-offs in mind. In this post, we’ll take a look at an approach that can give you a quick win when it comes to improving the way your Node.js apps handle the workload. An instance of Node.js runs in a single thread which means that on a multi-core system (which most computers are these days), not all cores will be utilized by the app.

We just released a Magic Dashboard for Garbage Collection stats for our Node.js integration. If you are leaking memory, this dashboard will help you discover and fix this problem. No setting up is required, this dashboard will magically automatically appear among the rest of your dashboards. ✨

Modules and mixins are, without doubt, great resources that make Ruby so attractive. They give the application the ability to share the code that can be used with ease in other places. It also helps us organize our code by grouping functionalities and concerns, which improves the readability and maintainability of our code. In this article, we will go through the concepts behind modules and mixins.

Monitoring for your Node.js apps can be hard. The tricky part is understanding what you need to monitor, instrumenting your code, and then making sense of all the data that’s been emitted. (That’s almost every part you might say 😅 ). At AppSignal, we dogfood our product and understand the pain users feel ourselves. The key points we focus on are the ease of use, flexibility, and developer experience.

According to a definition of multitenancy, when an app serves multiple tenants, it means that there are a few groups of users who share common access to the software instance. An excellent example of an app that supports multitenancy is the Jira platform, where each company has its subdomain to access the software, for example, mycompany.atlassian.net.