Today we’re taking our partnership with Chris Oliver — GoRails founder and creator of Hatchbox — one step further.
With AppSignal, you can already store enriched telemetry about your applications, services, and infrastructure, along with your user context, in your AppSignal context store. You can use that context store for traditional observability reporting and workflows, or connect it to your agents over MCP or the CLI.
AppSignal’s context store is what our Intelligence features are built on. With Chris’s help, we’ve added a new layer of expert context to the platform.
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Chris has been publishing GoRails since 2014. Alongside it he builds Jumpstart Pro, a Rails SaaS template, and Hatchbox, which has run more than two million deploys since 2016. He is also a notable co-host of the podcast, Remote Ruby.
His open source sits in the dependency tree of a lot of Rails apps — noticed for notifications, madmin for admin interfaces, receipts for invoicing, and plenty more.
Chris is a recognized expert, and we love how Hatchbox is built to solve real problems for Rails developers. So when we set out to give humans and agents the best possible context for reducing time to resolution, who better to ask for content that portrays the realities of running Rails in production?
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Our docs include ten Ruby and Rails tutorials as of today, some originally produced for GoRails and some with new material written for AppSignal users.
Start with the new one: Chris installing and configuring AppSignal in a Rails app. The other nine cover the tools that produce the data you end up monitoring — Solid Queue, Mission Control Jobs, batching background jobs, the debug gem, params.expect, parameters with defaults, impersonation, local CI, and the Rails 8.1 Markdown renderer.
Chris presents eight of the ten. Collin from GoRails takes the debug gem and the local CI runner.
These aren’t AppSignal guides. Our guides explain how to use AppSignal — installing it, configuring it, reading what it collects. The tutorials explain the Ruby and Rails tools underneath, which is perfect for distilling Chris and Collin’s years of experience into context for AppSignal.
What’s documented is what Chris and his team teach, published under our URLs, in the same corpus as everything else our Intelligence features read.
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Each tutorial pairs the video with a written walkthrough and transcript of the same material. Watch it, or read the commands in order.
The written half is shaped the way our agent install instructions are: requirements in a table, steps in order, and an explicit statement of what finishes each step. That isn’t a coincidence. Every docs page is served as plain Markdown at its own URL with a .md extension, listed in llms.txt, and bundled into a single llms-full.txt — so that shape is what an agent reads.
One page for both, rather than a human page and an agent copy that drift apart by the second edit. Hand your agent https://docs.appsignal.com/tutorials/ruby/solid-queue.md and it gets the same walkthrough you do. Our own Intelligence agents read these pages, and so does any agent you build and point at the docs yourself.
The install tutorial makes the same point from the other end: it links straight out to our instructions for coding agents, so you can watch Chris do it or hand the whole job over.
Where necessary, we made small edits to accommodate changes in Rails that shipped after the videos were produced.
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This week we’re gearing up for Rails World 2026, in Austin, Texas. The AppSignal team will be there in force, and we will be publishing each day some of the work that we’ve been up to. As a teaser, we’ll be blogging about some of the Intelligence work that we’ve added that’s a part of this story and showcases how we bring in this expert context.
If a tutorial is wrong, tell us! If there’s a topic you need deeper insight into, request it. For more insight into what Intelligence features we’re building, follow along in AppSignal Labs. Published
Wondering what you can do next? #
- [Try out AppSignal with a 30-day free trial](https://appsignal.com/users/sign_up) .
- [Reach out to our support team with any feedback or questions](mailto:support@appsignal.com) .
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AppSignal monitors your apps #
AppSignal provides insights for Ruby, Rails, Elixir, Phoenix, Node.js, Express and many other frameworks and libraries. We are located in beautiful Amsterdam. We love stroopwafels. If you do too, let us know. We might send you some!