Free Heroku Monitoring

November 10, 2020

The key goal of performance monitoring is to ensure that the end-users are provided with seamless and high-quality experience. There are diverse monitoring tools available that provide IT administrators with all the information they need to figure out whether there are any issues that are negatively impacting the performance of an application or not. 

When it comes to monitoring your Heroku application, it’s best to look for a tool that is designed for monitoring Heroku directly. One such tool is HG Heroku monitoring. HG Heroku monitoring can do anything time series, from APM to systems to infrastructure monitoring. HG Heroku monitoring is built on a Hosted Graphite service, by MetricFire. With foundations in Hosted Graphite, HG Heroku monitoring offers Hosted Graphite, Grafana and Prometheus.

Heroku is an extremely popular container-based cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) that is used to deploy, manage and scale modern applications. This platform is quite agile and easy to use, providing you with a simple way to get your app to the market. However, the typical Heroku monitoring tools given by Heroku don’t offer what tools such as HG Heroku Monitoring can offer. Proper Heroku monitoring is required to spot issues in advance and swiftly respond to them. 

Free Heroku Monitoring

There are plenty of automatically included free heroku monitoring tools included in your Heroku account, however they’re not very effective. The regular free Heroku monitoring tools give you just the basics on what your app is doing. You won’t be able to understand what’s happening in depth.

Fortunately, HG Heroku monitoring is available to help out developers with their systems monitoring. HG Heroku monitoring isn’t free, but it’s pretty close - just 29 bucks a month. Sign up for the app and check it out! 

Take a look at the HG Heroku monitoring dashboards here:

A screenshot of Hosted Graphite's auto generated Heroku dashboard.


There are multiple ways to effectively monitor Heroku apps. We recommend using HG’s Hosted Graphite, Grafana, and StatsD. HG Heroku Monitoring is built on Hosted Graphite, Grafana and StatsD. Recently HG Heroku Monitoring even launched their Prometheus add-on, so you can pipe in Prometheus metrics into your HG Heroku Monitoring dashboards, at no extra cost!

The following pointers mark certain monitoring that people can use to competently monitor Heroku apps:

  • Logging: The logging tools are meant for collecting and storing Heroku app and database. In the scenario of any incident, these logs can be used to identify what is wrong and narrow down a fix. You can even refer to the logs for root cause analysis, subsequent to the incident. You have to set up a logging tool by installing a Heroku add-on. The Logging category is known to feature multiple logging tools, each of them having distinctive retention timings and characteristics.
  • Application performance monitoring (APM): The APM tools provide details about the application performance, enabling you to effectively identify its parts that might be causing the slowness. The data from the APM tool can be used for the purpose of optimizing slow endpoints and guiding the app performance towards superior efficiency. You have to set up an APM tool by installing a Heroku add-on.
  • Error monitoring: The error monitoring tools have the capacity to capture errors or exceptions made by the app. These errors may originate from a framework, dependencies, or your code.  Through error monitoring, you can opt to view error’s stack trace and subsequently drill down to its root cause.  Being orderly aware of the errors in your app shall help you to troubleshoot faster.
  • Platform monitoring: The tools for platform monitoring tend to capture router metrics, Redis metrics, Postgres metrics, and dyno metrics from the Heroku platform, and ultimately present them in visual dashboards. These tools can even be used to surface diverse types of issues, such as a rapid increase in database load or dyno running out of memory.
  • Heroku threshold alerting: This system provides you a notification when the response time or error rate of your app becomes too high. Typically, the response times for apps recommended by Heroku is 500ms or less.  The threshold alerting offers near-real-time notification for a performance issue, and hence you get the opportunity to resolve it before it causes downtime.


One of the most competent and efficient ways to monitor Heroku apps would be through companies like HG Heroku monitoring. The HG Heroku monitoring platform basically runs both on-cloud and on-premise, and provides a suite of open source monitoring tools. These free monitoring tools include Grafana, Prometheus and Hosted Graphite, which essentially combine resources to become a comprehensive application, infrastructure, and network monitoring platform.

Don’t use free Heroku monitoring, you won’t get what you need. It’s better to pay a little and use HG Heroku monitoring than waste tons of time trying to configure the free heroku monitoring solutions.

You can also visit their website to get a free trial for Heroku monitoring.



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