How do you ensure your Rails app is running well? There are many application, database and server metrics available and each can provide useful information about your system. Organizing and evaluating that data allows you to quickly assess how your application is performing and identify problems. This post introduces the ways FiveRuns Manage helps you ensure your Rails applications remain healthy and responsive.
Manage was designed to monitor your complete Rails environment and deliver organized, actionable status information. The Manage dashboard aggregates metrics from your full Rails stack, including operating system, database, Mongrel, memcached, Apache and nginx. Metrics are trended over time and provide drill down detail for interesting measurements or those indicating a potential problem.
The Right Tools To Measure Rails Health
Starting with individual apps and groups of application clusters, Manage summarizes the current Rails availability status. Threshold triggers provide even more detailed monitoring of specific rails metrics and other applications on your system.
Select a Rails application or cluster above for detailed performance analytics. The Application Dashboard below identifies the slowest measured controllers across the Rails environment on the right and those receiving the most activity below. Sparkline graphs on the left provide a summary of recent Rails performance trends and each link to detailed statistics. The metric span can be adjusted between 1 and 24 hours to view a specific period of interest. In this example, the Rails application’s response time is increasing, but there is no additional request load occurring during the same period, which could indicate a problem trend.
The Manage System Browser displays these trends in more detail and allows correlation with other system metrics. If the degraded Rails application response time is being is caused by a memory leak on the app server or low disk space on the MySQL back end, this is the place to find it.
The System Browser is also a great place to assess baselines for your Rails environment monitors. Metric data is available spanning periods up to 48 hours and covering every level of the application stack.
Digging Deeper
For even greater precision, Manage Reports combine critical Rails health measurements into a single, consolidated view. System Overview Reports are provided out of the box or customize your own to the individual controllers, models and actions most important to you.
To keep a constant on eye on your Rails application’s health status, Manage triggers events when thresholds you set are exceeded. You can choose be notified by email with a summary of the event and links back to the FiveRuns Manage console for complete troubleshooting.
Stay tuned for future posts on using FiveRuns Manage to keep your Rails applications healthy, including additional information on specific metrics, use of triggers and how to create custom reports that focus on your key metrics.
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