We just added a Rails application dashboard to FiveRuns Manage that summarizes high-level application metrics. If you are a current user of FiveRuns Manage, you can now easily assess your Rails application’s health with a quick glance. If you are not currently a FiveRuns Manage user, it’s easy to start a free 30-day trial by clicking here.
Here’s how it works. This single-page view presents what we consider the most relevant data about any monitored Rails application. It highlights important metrics for sysadmins and also provides starting points for developers to improve an application’s performance, if necessary.
On the left “Performance” column, users find average global metrics and associated sparkline graphs for the selected time period. The page default is 6 hours but can span a range from 1 to 24 hours. Following any of these metrics takes users to the detailed, interactive metric graphs in Manage.
As a complement, the right “Analytics” column lists the ten slowest actions and the ten most invoked actions of this application. Combined, both tables provide developers valuable indicators where to spend their energy to improve the overall application performance.
Following these links sends users to the application analytics page that breaks down action performance into more granular detail. For example, developers can learn how much time an action spends using specific models or rendering specific partials. We published a popular Rails application performance optimization post a while ago that explains in detail how to debug typical performance bottlenecks with the application analytics pages in FiveRuns Manage.
Developers need to evaluate the priority of performance issues of particular actions. That’s why both average response time and the number of invocations together are important. The below screenshot shows an example scenario where the slowest action of an application is not even listed in the list of most frequently called invoked actions. Here, the index action of the MetricGraphsController is the slowest one. However, it only gets invoked twice during this 6 hour time window. In order to improve overall Rails application performance, engineering resources might be better applied to another actions that get called much more often.
As a FiveRuns Manage user, you will see the new app health pages whenever you select an application or cluster from the application map. They are the new starting points for exploring the performance of your Rails applications in production and will greet you whenever you check on your Rails applications.
If you’re not yet using FiveRuns Manage to monitor and tune your production Rails applications, please check out our free 30 day trial.
Continued Discussion
2 responses to this entry
Looks really impressive. This is my first look at your product and array of open source bundles, and without trying it out for myself yet, it looks like really useful stuff. Delicious’ed for future use. =)
on July 25, 2008 at 01:44 PM
That dashboard looks great!
on July 29, 2008 at 03:30 AM