AppSignal Signals October newsletter

Product Update Oct 2026 Hi friends 👋. Welcome back to Signals. Since our last edition, we promised distributed tracing and showed you a few AppSignal Labs betas. This issue, we're paying things off. About a 3-minute read. This month’s headliner: AppSignal is now in Claude’s connector directory. Plus distributed tracing in beta, incidents you can fix from Slack, and join us at 🌁 SF Ruby 2026 in November. What we shipped • AppSignal is now in Claude’s connector directory. In Claude, open Settings → Connectors, search “AppSignal,” and click Connect. Then ask: “Did last night’s cron job run?” Your coding agent can also add your next app from one prompt. → Connect AppSignal to Claude • Distributed tracing, now in beta. In August we said it was coming. It’s here. Follow one checkout across every service, including the Sidekiq job it enqueued, and see which hop was slow. → See how it works • Fix incidents from Slack. Our newest Slack app lets you close, assign, and set severity right from the alert. Every action lands in the incident’s logbook. → Install the Slack app • Only the errors your deploy introduced. Pick a revision, choose New errors, and see what first appeared there. Also, your deploys on Heroku are now detected automatically. Short reads for long queries • Why you shouldn’t vibe code your monitoring tool - the case against building your own, from people who build one for a living. • AppSignal vs all the tools it replaces - AppSignal vs Cronitor, Rollbar, and the rest of the tools it replaces. • Your Rails logs, but useful - log levels, tagged logs, and structured logging, refreshed this month. 📺 For the “just show me” crowd. Watch Chris Oliver of GoRails install AppSignal on a real Rails app, then hunt a real production error. → Watch the tutorial Customer spotlight: HR Partner paid for a year of AppSignal in one month Three developers, 57 billion requests, switched from New Relic. Fixing slow code cut their server bill enough to cover AppSignal’s annual cost in a month, and render times fell from 14 seconds to under 2. “AppSignal’s pricing was easier to understand, and you get all the features for one price.” - Devan Sabaratnam, CTO. → Read their story 🌁 SF Ruby, Nov 10-11 At SF Ruby? We’re sponsoring, so come say hi at SFJAZZ, talk Rails and tracing, and grab some swag. → Join us at SF Ruby 👩💻 Developer Dilemmas. What’s the oldest “temporary” hotfix still running in your production app? Reply to this email. The best responses win a bundle of stroopwafels. The stash is stocked. Happy Monitoring! – The AppSignal Team AppSignal P.O. Box 10212, Amsterdam, Netherlands You’re receiving this because you subscribed to AppSignal updates. Unsubscribe