Overview

InformantSinatra

The informant-sinatra gem provides Sinatra hooks for The Informant.

Compatibility

The informant-sinatra gem officially supports Ruby 2.5+.

It will work automatically with Sinatra 2+ and automatically activate validation tracking for ActiveRecord and Mongoid models.

Installation

1. Sign up for an account on https://www.informantapp.com or through one of our parters, Heroku or Manifold.
2. Add the informant-sinatra gem to your Gemfile.

   gem 'informant-sinatra', group: :production

1. Verify the INFORMANT_API_KEY is set in your app's environment.
2. Bootstrap the Informant in your app's setup.

   class MySinatraApp < Sinatra::Base
     register InformantSinatra::Bootstrap

1. Deploy with the gem installed.
2. Submit a form and you'll see it appear in our web interface.

Troubleshooting

The Informant gem includes a rake task to diagnose connectivity problems. From your server environment execute rake informant:diagnostic and it will print helpful information to the terminal.

Note: Sinatra doesn't load rake tasks from gems by default so you'll need to have code in your Rakefile to do it.

Usage

By default, any request that causes an ActiveRecord or Mongoid model to be validated will be tracked by the Informant once the gem is added to your project.

Custom Tracking

If you have other objects that conform to the ActiveModel interface, you can include validation tracking in your class and it will just work.

class VeryActiveModel
  include ActiveModel::Model
  include InformantSinatra::ValidationTracking
end

Configuration

Configuration options are specified in the InformantSinatra::Config module. Reasonable defaults are provided but you can override them as necessary by creating an initializer and passing a block to configure.

InformantSinatra::Config.configure do |config|
  config.api_token = ENV['INFORMANT_API_KEY']
  config.exclude_models = %w(UntrackedModel)
  config.filter_parameters.push *%w(password password_confirmation)
  config.value_tracking = true
end

api_token

Default Value: ENV['INFORMANT_API_KEY']

Example Value: dff67d9e61eaa8cf110b3d3f3238a671

This should be set to the API key assigned to you when you provisioned your application. Heroku will automatically add this to your environment when you provision the addon. Otherwise, you can get this from the Informant web application.

exclude_models

Default Value: []

Example Value: ['Person', 'Employee']

This allows you to exclude certain models from tracking. If you don't want them included in your metrics list their class names as strings here.

filter_parameters

Default Value: ['password', 'token']

Example Value: ['password', 'token']

Any field values with names matching the strings in this array will be excluded from tracking. Sensitive information you wouldn't want to include in your server log should be listed here as well.

value_tracking

Default Value: true

Example Value: false

This will enable and disable tracking of values globally. If you turn this off, no field value information will be tracked at all. This is useful if you have compliance or security concerns about the nature of your data.