FiveRuns Blog

FiveRuns Manage 2.0, the latest version of our Ruby on Rails application monitoring product, is now ready for public beta consumption. We’ve been working on a number of enhancements to the product, and would welcome your feedback! To signup and take FiveRuns Manage for a spin, just visit manage.fiveruns.com/signup.

Since our initial launch of FiveRuns Manage almost a year ago, we’ve been working with customers, partners and other members of the Ruby on Rails community to continually improve the service, and make the lives of everyone developing, deploying and managing Rails applications easier. In this release, we’ve made things even simpler, lighter-weight, added monitoring support for more subsystems, and added few features based on your feedback. So, what’s new? Read on to find out more:

Aggregated Rails Cluster Metrics

With this new release, FiveRuns Manage allows you to view aggregated Rails performance metrics across your server cluster. If your popular Rails application runs across six servers behind a load balancer, FiveRuns Manage now offers an single, aggregated view of that application.

Of course, the new version still collects and displays detailed Rails application metrics across the whole framework, so you can quickly see where application performance problems are occurring and nip them in the bud. This release has simplified the interface, while providing the depth of Rails metrics for which FiveRuns Manage is known.

Added monitoring for Mongrel, nginx, PostgreSQL, and memcached

Our product philosophy has always included monitoring the full Rails application stack – from the OS through the database to the web server. This release includes support for various operating systems, MySQL Server, PostrgeSQL, nginx, Apache Web Server, memcached, and Mongrel.

If you have a performance problem with your production application, is it a Rails-specific issue, or is the CPU overloaded? How does memory utilization look? Are you running out of disk space? How are database queries performing?

FiveRuns Manage provides all of this information in one interface and lets you quickly see how the total environment is performing. Other monitoring approaches that only look at Rails app performance could easily give you false positives – point you to a performance problem in the app that is not in fact the culprit. Monitoring the entire stack is critical, we believe, when managing production Rails implementations.

The FiveRuns Systems Map gives you a quick view into all of the systems you’re monitoring:

Triggers and Events

Want to immediately learn when your Rails apps slows down or becomes unavailable? FiveRuns Manage lets you set up contextual triggers for different system conditions. When conditions are met, the triggers create events, and users are automatically notified via a notification chain.

Here is an example of a Rails-specific Trigger. Let’s assume you want to make sure that all actions in your LoginController get executed within at most 30ms – across all of your application instances that are running on multiple servers. Should a request exceed that time, you will be immediately informed and can address this issue should it impact the user experience:

Users can then quickly drill down into the event, view all of the metrics across all of the monitored subsystems that fired the trigger and resolve the issue. Triggers can easily be set up for any subsystem monitored by the FiveRuns Manage service.

Interactive Metric Graphs

Fully interactive, granular metric graphs let you correlate performance metrics across the Rails app and all of your monitored systems. The cursor follows your mouse movements and the displays the exact metric values of the graph.

Small Client, Optmimized for Virtualized Environments

In addition to these items, our team has worked with Rich Kilmer, Chad Fowler, and the team at InfoEther to make FiveRuns Manage significantly easier to install and run. As a result, FiveRuns Manage now features:

• A lightweight client that consumes minimal resources and is optimized for virtualized environments – small slices, Amazon EC2, whatever your server environment, FiveRuns Manage provides full system monitoring with very little overhead.
• Easier to Install Rails Instrumentation, now using RubyGems for easier plugin management.

Beta Access

To get started with the beta, go to manage.fiveruns.com/signup. You can get help directly through the interface via Campfire, check out the Forums, or use the provided email links.

Thanks, and please let us know what you think!

Supported Beta OS Platforms:

• Linux 2.6.x on Intel (incl. Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, Gentoo)
• OS X 10.4 and up (Intel)
• Solaris 10 and up (Intel)

Supported Beta Subsystems for Monitoring:

• Rails 2.0.2 and up (running on MRI 1.8.6 or JRuby 1.1)
• MySQL Server 4.0 and up
• PostgreSQL 8.1 and up
• nginx Web Server 0.5 and up (with stats plugin)
• Apache Web Server 2.2 (with mod_status module)
• memcached 1.2 and up
• Mongrel 1.0.2 and up