FiveRuns Blog

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.

Hot on the heels of the ‘Run Your Way to RailsConf Europe’ contest announcement, we’ve released version 0.8.11 of FiveRuns TuneUp. Since our last publicly-announced release, we’ve made a few substantial fixes and improvements. Most notably, these include:

• Signup and login for the TuneUp service is now only required if you want to share a run. If you just want to use TuneUp locally for your own personal development, you don’t need to sign up at all. If, however, you decide that you’d like to use the (free) TuneUp service to share your runs with colleagues or the Rails community, registration is simple.
• Instrumentation for partial rendering under Rails 2.1 now works properly.
• Fixed some lingering issues with XHTML Strict 1.0 compliance.

Grab the latest gem and get to tuning up your Rails application!

So, RailsConf was awesome. Portland was great. But, you’re still wanting more? Hmmm, RailsConf Europe is right around the corner… But, how to get there?

We’d like to help. FiveRuns wants to send you and a guest to RailsConf Europe, September 2 -4, 2008 in Berlin! Entering the contest is easy.

Just download FiveRuns TuneUp, our new, free Rails application profiling tool and upload an application profile (a “Run”) to the FiveRuns TuneUp service between now and August 8, 2008. Current TuneUp users are free to upload Runs, too. We’ll conduct a random drawing out of all the Runs submitted, and if your name is chosen, you and a friend will be on your way to Berlin – airfare, hotel and RailsConf passes included!

So, download TuneUp now, and start Running your way to RailsConf Europe! Hope to see you in Berlin!

Official Rules. Contest open to existing or new users of FiveRuns TuneUp. Download FiveRuns TuneUp at tuneup.fiveruns.com and post a run between July 10 and August 8, 2008 at tuneup.fiveruns.com. On or about August 8, 2008, FiveRuns will conduct a random drawing from all of the users who submitted Runs. The winner will receive two coach class roundtrip tickets to RailsConf Europe 2008, accommodations in Berlin, Germany, and two full conference passes to RailsConf Europe 2008. Airfare accommodations will be roundtrip from the international airport closest to the winner’s home to Berlin, Germany. Flight must depart winner’s international airport on August 31, 2008 and depart Berlin, Germany on September 5, 2008.

We’re pleased to announce that the FiveRuns blog has been included in Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop Ruby site.

If you’re not familiar with Alltop, the site aggregates RSS feeds from “all the top” sites on the web around a particular topic – everything from Startups to Space to Sports. Or in our case, from the Geekery category, Ruby. You can read the FAQ here.

It’s an honor to be included, along with some of the most notable Ruby and Rails blogs on the Web.

Following the launch of the FiveRuns TuneUp beta, Michael Cote of Redmonk completes round 2 of his interview with Steve Sanderson, FiveRuns VP Development & Technology, and Bruce WIlliams, Rubyist and FiveRuns developer.

This week at RailsConf, we excited to be unveiling the beta of FiveRuns Tuneup. Our new socially-networked application performance profiling tool for developers.

Our team is made up of Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers. We’re living it every day. And loving it. But, like many, our team has been frustrated in the past looking for simple, elegant ways to debug application performance in development, without having to dig through log files. Collaborating with the community to solve performance problems in Rails applications has also been a challenge, is unfocused, and frequently requires too much context switching – hampering much of the productivity goodness we love about Rails.

What if we could combine simple, graphical performance analysis, that is fully integrated into the development process, with drill-down and troubleshooting capability, and tie in community collaboration for help and advice? TuneUp was born to answer that question.

FiveRuns TuneUp gives developers deep visibility and relevant information to debug and improve the performance of their application, and a community setting to collaborate with others to solve tough performance problems.

Check out a screencast of TuneUp in action here.

TuneUp is, and always will be, a FREE service, it’s dead-simple to install (just drop he plugin into your app) and it’s available now. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Michael Cote of Redmonk interviews Steve Sanderson, FiveRuns VP Development & Technology, and Bruce WIlliams, Rubyist and FiveRuns developer on the FiveRuns Manage 2.0 beta release.

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

This week, we’re happy to introduce Todd Barr, FiveRuns’ new Vice President of Business Development, and get his thoughts on open source, Rails, and why he came to FiveRuns. As you may have seen, Todd joins us after spending the last six years at Red Hat, where among other things, he was responsible for launching and growing their Enterprise Linux ISV ecosystem.

FiveRuns: First of all Todd, welcome to FiveRuns and congratulations! You have a deep background in open source, starting with Linux, JBoss and now with Rails. What parallels do you see between them today, and/or between Rails today and Linux 6-7 years ago?

Todd Barr: Just to set some context here – I’m not a developer (although I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night). So my perspective on open source tends to be a bit more theoretical than technical. From what I’ve seen, successful open source movements tend to have three things in common: 1) an overwhelming user advantage, 2) strong leadership, and 3) a vibrant commercial ecosystem. Some examples are useful here: Linux allowed users to get off of Solaris and save a ton of money moving to Intel servers, has Linus Torvalds (and a bunch of other strong technical leaders), and has attracted an amazing commercial ecosystem with the likes of Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, Dell, etc. JBoss allowed developers to download a full J2EE app server for free and save a ton of money over BEA in production, was led by Marc Fleury, and has developed a growing ecosystem of tools, SIs, and SOA partners. The list could go on and on.

So, let’s apply the formula to Rails: 1) an overwhelming user advantage – CHECK… developers can develop code in a fraction of the time, and they actually enjoy it. 2) leadership – CHECK… DHH, along with a growing group of community leaders, and 3) commercial ecosystem – EARLY… and there-in lies the opportunity for a company like FiveRuns, and the answer to why I’m here.

FiveRuns: What was your first experience in Rails, and what led you to make the jump here and now? What do you think are Ruby and Rails’ biggest assets? Biggest challenges?

Todd Barr: My defining experience with Rails was when I discovered this presentation. DHH had me at “First they ignore you…” (that particular Gandhi quote adorns the lobby of Red Hat’s HQ, and is in this awesome video. As I said, I’m not a developer – but even I understand Ruby on Rails. It’s beautiful in its simplicity. Convention over configuration makes sense to me – in this day and age, I think we are all looking for a few less things to worry about. A language that a mere mortal can understand makes sense, from the perspective of future supportability of an app. It has a real design sense (that is user-centric). And I think it is at the cusp of much broader adoption. But there are challenges – not unlike the challenges Java faced years ago – some real (like the lack of enough Rails development talent), and some perceived (does it scale? does it perform? is it appropriate for mission-critical workloads?). Everyone’s now asking that unanswerable question – is it ready for the enterprise?

FiveRuns: So, is Ruby on Rails ready for the enterprise? Hey, you tee-d this up…

Todd Barr: Who cares? Seriously, I think it’s the wrong question, and always has been. A better question is this: can enterprise development organizations be nimble enough to adopt Ruby on Rails? Can developers learn to take advantage of Rails development velocity, by embracing rapid prototyping alongside their business customers? Can we, as the extended Rails community, tell our story in such a compelling way that companies can’t resist it? Can we prove out IT-ism’s like scalability, reliability, performance, etc. but with real world, contextual examples where Ruby on Rails really makes sense? Our challenge is not to change Ruby on Rails to get it ready for the enterprise – our challenge is to make it valuable and easy for companies to adopt Rails.

FiveRuns: So in return, are you going to make Matt Asay an offer he can’t refuse, or what? In all seriousness, though, does your hiring signal that open source is going to play more formally into the overall strategy for FiveRuns?

Todd Barr: Hey Matt – check’s in the mail (kidding). Open source is a big part of why I’m here. And it’s not because FiveRuns didn’t “get” open source before I arrived – they absolutely do. Bruce, Adam, everyone – they get it. They get the fact that you can’t exploit an open source community and hope to succeed. You have to make meaningful contributions that help rise the tide and float all Rails boats. So, to answer your question a bit more directly: yes, at FiveRuns we will both make and influence meaningful contributions to the Ruby and Rails communities, and we will be working to grow the commercial ecosystem around Rails – all while building products that help customers succeed and that don’t exploit the community.

FiveRuns: You have a strong track record in building out partner programs, for example, growing the partnership and certification programs for ISVs at Red Hat to more than 1000 certified applications in the first two years. As the new VP of Business Development at FiveRuns, what are your immediate priorities in the first 100 days? How is the Ruby on Rails ecosystem different than the Linux and JBoss ecosystems you are used to?

Todd Barr: The Rails ecosystem is much different. In my short experience, I find it to be much more modern and decentralized because it is growing-up in a different time, alongside three other emerging industries: hosting (specifically, virtual hosting), SaaS, and freelance development shops. Taken to the extreme, apps of the future are going to be in-the-cloud, on-demand and outsourced, or “in-on-out” (I made that up… can you tell?). So at FiveRuns, we will develop partner programs that build toward that future. Hosters, development shops, and SaaS providers will certainly be a priority, along with ISVs that are embracing Rails. And I think there will be interesting relationships to be had with those who are trying to integrate Rails into existing paradigms (like JRuby, IronRuby, etc.). As a company focused on Ruby and Rails application performance, I think we will also want to play nice with existing systems management and infrastructure players, so I’m sure we’ll spend some time there. Finally, an immediate priority is selling my house so that I can move my family to Austin. Know anyone who needs a great house in Raleigh?

Todd Barr joined FiveRuns as VP of Business Development in February 2008 from Red Hat, where he spent six years in various senior marketing and business development roles. At Red Hat, Todd built and grew the partnership and certification programs for independent software vendors (ISVs), achieving over 1000 certified applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the first two years. In his most recent role, Todd’s team was responsible for building Red Hat’s global go-to-market campaigns, along with channel and partner marketing. Previously, Todd was with the corporate venture capital group at Dell and was an early sales and marketing employee at CitySearch.com (now part of IAC). Todd blogs about open source, marketing strategy and closed-loop marketing at marketingfree.typepad.com.

Early next week we will be releasing a Partner Dashboard as part of the FiveRuns RM-Manage service. With the new dashboard, our reseller partners can see all of their FiveRuns customers in a single view and quickly drill down into events that need resolution.

With the new dashboard, a partner simply logs into their FiveRuns domain and they will see a list of all of their customers with the most vital information – availability and events – by server. Plus, there are quick links to the events and the individual customer accounts. Time is the one thing we can never have enough of and if we can save our partners a few clicks, we consider that a good thing.

Here is the first look at the Partner Dashboard. Just don’t tell marketing we showed it to you early ;-).

So, if you are a hoster, development shop, a consultant, or anyone who is monitoring systems for multiple customers, this is one more reason to join our RAMP Partner Program.

As a finalist for the SXSW Web Awards, FiveRuns is also up for the People’s Choice Award, the online public’s favorite finalist from the SXSW Web Awards competition. The People’s Choice Winner will be unveiled at the Web Awards Ceremony on March 9, along with all the category winners and Best of Show.

So, if you like our site, or if you are fans of the FiveRuns user experience for monitoring your Ruby on Rails applications, we would certainly appreciate your vote. Just follow the instructions at this link to vote – you can vote every day! The deadline for voting is midnight (CST) on Monday, March 3.

Thanks for your support!

SXSW has announced the finalists for their annual web awards, and FiveRuns has made the cut under the CSS category! We’re definitely honored and excited for the recognition, but must certainly thank our friend and designer Scott Boms at Wishlingline for his awesome work. Not only does Scott do the best website design we’ve ever seen, but he also helps drive the user experience around our products.

We’re firm believers that Rails provides the best development experience in the world today, and FiveRuns is happy to extend that experience to the products you use every day to monitor and manage your Rails applications.

The Interactive Web Awards will be handed out by emcee Eugene Mirman on Sunday, March 9th at the Hilton Austin Downtown. We’re keeping our fingers crossed!

Together with our Partner Bitrock we have just released an updated version of our Rails stack RM-Install. The major changes are the upgrade to Rails 2.0 and the addition of Mac OS X on PowerPC processors. The updated stack also addresses installation problems on Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Leopard.

Looking at the included Ruby components here are the most visible upgrades from the first version of RM-Install that we launched last fall:

• Rails 2.0.2
• Mongrel 1.1.3
• Capistrano 2.1.0

You can download RM-Install from our website.

Congratulations to FiveRuns partner Engine Yard on their recent funding from Benchmark Capital. This is great news for Engine Yard, as well for the Ruby and Rails communities. We’ve been investing in and betting on a future filled with Rails production applications and this news completely validates our common view of the market and the opportunity that it represents to the community.

We’re firm believers that continued investments in the ecosystem around Ruby and Rails are needed, whether they are used to propel the continued progress of Rubinius and Merb, or used to build out the tools needed to deploy and monitor Rails applications in production environments.

While Rails continues its awesome momentum, we still see many businesses waiting on the sidelines to benefit from this great framework. What are they waiting for? A better development environment? Not really. They tell us that they are waiting for an ecosystem of tools, services, support, and best practices that will ensure that if they build a business-critical Rails application it will integrate into their existing environments, scale, be available, and perform. For many companies, their desire to use Rails is mitigated by the early adopter risks associated with thoughts of having an important Rails application operating without the safety net of a supportive ecosystem. The opportunity to address this concern is why we’re excited to work in this space.

Congrats again to Lance and the team at Engine Yard. Here’s to more investment in our community!

FiveRuns partner, Atlantic Dominion Solutions announced today a new service to provide continuous monitoring and management for Rails apps deployed onto Amazon EC2. ADS Mantis combines dedicated 24×7 service with management and monitoring tools from RightScale and FiveRuns. The only solution of its kind, ADS Mantis minimizes downtime by continuously monitoring EC2-deployed Rails applications, thus enabling the ADS team to prevent and, when necessary, quickly respond to issues.

This is great news for EC2 customers, many of whom have been attracted to EC2 for its flexibility. With ADS Mantis, they can now get peace of mind that their Rails applications will operate at optimal performance. We are excited to be a part of this offering and look forward to working with ADS to help EC2 customers monitor, manage and scale their Rails applications.