Rails Performance

Self-hosted tool to monitor the performance of your Ruby on Rails application.

This is simple and free alternative to the New Relic APM, Datadog or other similar services.

It allows you to track:

  • throughput report (see amount of RPM (requests per minute))
  • an average response time
  • the slowest controllers & actions
  • total duration of time spent per request, views rendering, DB
  • SQL queries, rendering log in recent requests
  • simple 500-crashes reports

All data are stored in local Redis and not sent to any 3rd party servers.

Production

Gem is production-ready. At least on my 2 applications with ~800 unique users per day it works perfect.

Usage

Default configulation is listed below. But you can overide it.

Create config/initializers/rails_performance.rb

RailsPerformance.setup do |config|
  config.redis    = Redis::Namespace.new("#{Rails.env}-rails-performance", redis: Redis.new)
  config.duration = 4.hours

  config.debug    = false # currently not used>
  config.enabled  = true

  # protect your Performance Dashboard with HTTP BASIC password
  config.http_basic_authentication_enabled   = false
  config.http_basic_authentication_user_name = 'rails_performance'
  config.http_basic_authentication_password  = 'password12'

  # if you need an additional rules to check user permissions
  config.verify_access_proc = proc { |controller| true }
  # for example when you have `current_user`
  # config.verify_access_proc = proc { |controller| controller.current_user && controller.current_user.admin? }
end if defined?(RailsPerformance)

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rails_performance'

And then execute:

$ bundle

You must also have installed Redis server, because this gem is storing data into it.

After installation and configuration, start your Rails application, make a few requests, and open https://localhost:3000/rails/performance URL.

Limitations

  • it doesn't track params of POST/PUT requests
  • it doesn't track Redis/ElasticSearch or other apps
  • it can't compare historical data
  • depending on your load you may need to reduce time of for how long you store data, because all calculations are done in memory and it could take some time for high-load apps

Redis

All information is stored into Redis. The default expiration time is set to config.duration from the configuration.

Development & Testing

Just clone the repo, setup dummy app (rails db:migrate).

After this:

  • rails s
  • rake tests

Like a regular web development.

Please note that to simplify integration with other apps all CSS/JS are bundled inside, and delivered in body of the request. This is to avoid integration with assets pipeline or webpacker.

For UI changes you need to use Bulma CSS (https://bulma.io/documentation).

Why

The idea of this gem grew from curriosity how many RPM my app receiving per day. Later it evolutionated to something more powerful.

TODO

  • documentation in Readme
  • capture stacktrace of 500 errors and show in side panel
  • generator for initial config
  • CI for tests
  • time/zone config?
  • connected charts on dashboard, when zoom, when hover?
  • ability to zoom to see requests withing specific datetime range
  • better hints?
  • export to csv
  • better stats tooltip, do not show if nothing to show
  • dark mode toggle? save to the cookies?
  • integration with elastic search? or other?
  • monitor active job (sidekiq)?
  • better logo?
  • number of requests last 24 hours, hour, etc.
  • collect deprecation.rails
  • fix misspellings?
  • show "loading banner" until jquery is loaded?

Contributing

You are welcome to contribute. I've a big list of TODO.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.