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To provide a complete picture of your application’s infrastructure, you should monitor all servers your application depends on, such as database servers. You can do this by running the AppSignal Collector on those machines.

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Installation methods

Choose the installation method that works best for your infrastructure. If you’re using Docker (Compose) or Kubernetes, use the Docker image. If you have more than one application, or instances of an application, we recommend installing the collector to your infrastructure on its own instance, which all applications can report to. This will improve our reporting as we can piece together instrumentation data across different applications (distributed tracing). It is also more resource intensive to install the collector separately on each host.

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Set up a hosted collector

Distributed tracing only works through a hosted collector, and a hosted collector needs no configuration.
  1. Open the “Hosted Collectors” page in your organization settings. If the list is empty, create a collector there first.
  2. Open a collector and copy its “Collector URL”. Your application sends its data to this URL.

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Set up a self-hosted collector

  1. Install the collector as a Linux package or run it as a container using our Docker image.
  2. Configure it with the organization-level Push API key from the API keys settings page. Without a Push API key, the collector does not start.
By default, the collector listens on port 8099. Your application sends its data to the collector’s address on that port.

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Send data to the collector

With the collector running, point your application at its URL. Reporting to the collector lists the route for each language.