Scott Harvey

I've been building Rails applications for over 15 years. Across that time I've worked on SaaS products, internal tools, and high-traffic apps where performance problems were expensive and often hard to diagnose. Rails Pulse is what I built because I couldn't find a tool that did what I actually needed.

The specific problem I kept running into: every serious APM requires you to send your request data, query details, and stack traces to someone else's cloud. For a lot of teams that's fine. But I worked with teams where it wasn't. Teams with enterprise contracts that restricted where data could go. Teams handling sensitive data where the legal answer to "does our query data leave our servers?" needed to be a clear no. Teams that simply weren't comfortable with the trade-off and had no alternative.

The usual answer was "just use Datadog but configure it carefully" or "Skylight doesn't collect that much." Neither of those is the same as a hard guarantee that your data stays in your own database. So I built something that gives you that guarantee, without having to take anyone's word for it.

Rails Pulse is a Rails engine, not a SaaS. It runs inside your app. All the data it collects goes into your own database. There's no agent phoning home, no third-party cloud, no configuration required to keep your data private. It's private by default because the architecture makes it impossible to be otherwise.

It's also built specifically for Rails, not adapted from a generic HTTP monitoring tool. It understands Rails idioms: N+1 queries, slow ActiveRecord calls, background jobs, deployment events. The things that actually matter for a Rails app, not just response time histograms.

Get in touch

Questions, suggestions, or you want to share your experience with Rails monitoring: email me at hey@railspulse.com or find me on X at @scottharveyco.