Our customers keep sharing their excitement about Phusion’s Passenger as a reliable and usable platform for Rails deployment. We have noticed an even increased interest after the Passenger 2.0 release at RailsConf 2008. It is great to see the community tackling hard deployment problems and pushing the status quo.
Recently, we’ve been getting more questions from customers looking to use FiveRuns Manage to monitor Passenger environments. The good news, since the initial Passenger launch we have made sure that FiveRuns Manage supports monitoring Rails applications deployed on Passenger out-of-the-box.
Compared to a static Mongrel cluster configuration, a typical Passenger environment is highly dynamic. Depending on your request load and configuration, many Rails processes get spawned and terminated. Our Rails instrumentation is aware of this quite different temperament compared to statically load-balanced Mongrel environments. Also, our per-app service pricing model translates directly over to Passenger.
From our perspective, Passenger 2.0 has improved its default configuration . For example, the default setting for PassengerPoolIdleTime is now at 300 seconds. For certain monitoring edge cases, we still recommend doubling this time-out by adding below setting in your Passenger configuration:
PassengerPoolIdleTime 600
As outlined in our initial mod_rails post, FiveRuns Manage monitors Rails applications in dedicated Passenger installations, where you operate your own Apache environment. In these cases, FiveRuns Manage can already monitor the Apache Web Server directly via mod_status with metrics like requests per second or the number of active worker processes. Combined with the in-depth Rails metrics Manage also provides, it gives you a detailed picture of your current production environment.
For future enhancements, we’re looking at how FiveRuns Manage could leverage some of the bundled Passenger utilities like passenger-status or passenger-memory-status, which have to be executed with root privileges. We’re also investigating Rails monitoring in shared hosting environments, like Dreamhost.
If you are looking for a monitoring approach for your Passenger-based Rails apps, feel free to give our free, 30-day trial of FiveRuns Manage a try. We’d love to know what you think.
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