Kayla Reopelle: What Your Rails App Is Trying To Tell You

In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Kayla Reopelle, a lead software engineer at New Relic, where she works on both the Ruby Agent and OpenTelemetry RubyGems. They explore what observability means for Rails developers—not just as a debugging tool, but as a way to build clearer, more reliable systems. Kayla explains OpenTelemetry's vendor-agnostic approach to instrumentation and shares practical ways to experiment with traces, metrics, and logs in both production and local development.GitHub: https://github.com/kaylareopelle 🧰 Tools & Libraries MentionedActiveSupport::Notifications: Rails’ pub/sub API used for instrumentation.AppSignal: Rails-friendly APM and error tracking.AWS X-Ray: Distributed tracing for AWS services.Datadog: Full-stack observability platform.Elastics Profiling Spec: Donated profiling format for OpenTelemetry.Grafana: Open-source dashboards and visualization.Honeybadger : Error monitoring for Ruby apps.Jaeger: Distributed tracing system (CNCF).New Relic Ruby Agent: APM agent for Ruby and Rails.ObservableGauge (OTel Metrics): Async gauge for snapshots like queue size.OpenTelemetry Collector: Pipeline for receiving and exporting telemetry data.OpenTelemetry Logger Bridge: Sends Ruby logger output to OTEL.OpenTelemetry Ruby: Vendor-agnostic telemetry for Ruby.OpenTelemetry Ruby SIG: Community group maintaining OTEL Ruby.Prometheus: Metrics collection and storage.Rack Middleware: Web middleware stack used in many Rails instrumentations.Rails Structured Logging / Event Reporter: Structured logs built into Rails.Semantic Logger: Structured logging for Ruby & Rails.Stripe Ruby Gem: Payments client used as an instrumentation analogy.UpDownCounter (OTel Metrics): Counter for tracking active jobs.Send us Fan MailOn Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails. On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams modernize their Ruby on Rails applications.