You'll like Scout more than New Relic.

You could use a combination of Graphite, Logstash, and StatsD to build a custom solution.

May work if:

You only need monitoring in development, you have significant time and resources to stitch together a solution, and don't need any advanced features.

But we've learned from experience:

It's critical to have line-of-code insights into performance problems for developers. An open source mix can complement an app monitoring solution by monitoring the uptime of underlying services like databases, but they can't pinpoint problems tied to custom application code.

We've developed Scout specifically for line-of-code insights: developer time is expensive and pointing directly to a line-of-code and a developer dramatically reduces the time spent chasing issues.

You could use New Relic for application monitoring.

May work if:

You aren't using a newer PaaS or containerized deployment environment, aren't interested primarily in time-to-resolution, and don't mind pushy sales tactics.

But we've learned from experience:

We were New Relic customers for several years, but as the service evolved, new features were added that added bloat and actually made it more difficut to identify the root cause of issues.

Rather than building a do-everything solution, our customers have told us they want a solution that relentlessly focuses on tying performance problems to a line-of-code and the developer most familar with it. New Relic is a decade-old product: it's difficult to change course and incorporate the dramatic advances in code-level insights available today in Scout.

You could go with Skylight for application monitoring.

May work if:

Your apps are Ruby-only and doesn't require deep code and context insights.

But we've learned from experience:

While we like Skylight's clean UI, our customers tell us the scope of the service isn't large enough to handle their mission-critical apps. It lacks key features high-available apps require: error rates, backtraces, app resource usage, background job monitoring, and more.

Skylight also has a pure-Ruby focus. This requires teams with diverse stacks to use several app monitoring services.

Our customers tell us Scout provides the key features for monitoring mission-critical apps and broader support for application stacks as environments diversify.