RorVsWild

RoRvsWild is a ruby gem to monitor performances and exceptions in Ruby on Rails applications.

This gem has a double mode, development and production. It can be used without an account to monitor your requests performances in your development environment. It can also be used in your production and staging environments with an account on https://rorvswild.com. With such an account you also get extra benefits such as 30 day trace, background jobs monitoring, exceptions monitoring and notifications.

Installation

Install the gem

• Add in your Gemfile gem "rorvswild"
• Run bundle install in you terminal
• Restart your local server and you’ll see a small button in the bottom left corner of your page.

This is all what you need to do to monitor your local environment requests.

API key

To monitor your production or staging environment, you need an API key. Signup on https://www.rorvswild.com and create an app to get one.

• Add in your Gemfile gem "rorvswild"
• Run bundle install in you terminal
• Run rorvswild-install API_KEY in you terminal
• Deploy/Restart your app
• Make a few requests and refresh your app page on rorvswild.com to view the dashboard.

The rorvswild-install command creates a config/rorvswild.yml file.

If you prefer to use an initializer, you can do the following:

# config/initializers/rorvswild.rb
RorVsWild.start(api_key: API_KEY)

You can create unlimited apps on rorvswild.com. If you want to monitor your staging environment, create a new app and edit your rorvswild.yml to add the API key.

In case there is no data in the dashboard, you can run in a rails console : RorVsWild.check.

Development mode: RoRvsWild Local

RorVsWild Local monitors the performances of requests in development environment. It shows most of the requests performances insights RoRvsWild.com displays. A big difference is everything works locally and no data is sent and recorded on our servers. You don’t even need an account to use it.

RoRvsWild Local renders a small button in the bottom left corner of your page showing the runtime of the current request. If you click on it, you get all the profiled sections ordered by impact, which is depending on the sections average runtime and the calls count. As on RoRvsWild.com, the bottleneck is always on the top of the list.

You may want to hide or change the widget position like in the example below with the widget option :

# config/rorvswild.yml

development:
  widget: top-right 
  
#accepted values : top-left, top-right, bottom-right, bottom-left (default), hidden

You can still access the profiler at http://localhost:3000/rorvswild if you choose to hide the widget.

Be aware that the performances on your development machine may vary from the production server. Obviously because of the different hardware and database size. Also, Rails is reloading all the code in development environment and this takes quite a lot of time. To prevent this behaviour and better match the production, turn on cache_classes in your config/environments/development.rb:

Rails.application.configure do
  config.cache_classes = true
end

If you are using Rack::Deflater middleware you won't see the small button in the corner. Because of the compression it is not possible to inject some JavaScript into the page. In that case visit http://localhost:3000/rorvswild to see the profiler.

Production mode: RoRvsWild.com

RoRvsWild.com makes it easy to monitor requests, background jobs and errors in your production and staging environment. It also comes with some extra options listed below.

Measure any section of code

RorVsWild measures a lot of events such as SQL queries. But it might not be enough for you. There is a solution to measure any section of code to help you find the most hidden bottlenecks.

# Measure a code given as a string
RorVsWild.measure("bubble_sort(array)")

# Measure a code given as a block
RorVsWild.measure { bubble_sort(array) }

# Measure a code given as a block with an optional description
RorVsWild.measure("Optional description") { bubble_sort(array) }

For each custom measure, a section is added with the file name and line number where it has been called.

Send errors manually

When you already have a begin / rescue block, this manner suits well:

begin
  # Your code ...
rescue => exception
  RorVsWild.record_error(exception)
end

If you prefer to be concise, just run the code from a block:

RorVsWild.catch_error { 1 / 0 }  # => #<ZeroDivisionError: divided by 0>

Moreover, you can provide extra details when capturing errors:

RorVsWild.record_error(exception, {something: "important"})

RorVsWild.catch_error(something: "important") { 1 / 0 }

It is also possible to pre-fill this context data at the begining of each request or job :

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_action :prefill_error_context

  def prefill_error_context
    RorVsWild.merge_error_context(something: "important")
  end
end

Ignore requests, jobs, exceptions and plugins

From the configuration file, you can tell RorVsWild to skip monitoring some requests, jobs, exceptions and plugins.

# config/rorvswild.yml
production:
  api_key: API_KEY
  ignore_requests:
    - SecretController#index
  ignore_jobs:
    - SecretJob
  ignore_exceptions:
    - ActionController::RoutingError  # Ignore by default any 404
    - ZeroDivisionError
  ignore_plugins:
    - Sidekiq # If you don't want to monitor your Sidekiq jobs

Here is the equivalent if you prefer initialising RorVsWild manually.

# config/initializers/rorvswild.rb
RorVsWild.start(
  api_key: "API_KEY",
  ignore_requests: ["SecretController#index"],
  ignore_jobs: ["SecretJob"],
  ignore_exceptions: ["ActionController::RoutingError", "ZeroDivisionError"],
  ignore_plugins: ["Sidekiq"])

Finally here is the list of all plugins you can ignore :

• ActionController
• ActionMailer
• ActionView
• ActiveJob
• ActiveRecord
• DelayedJob
• Elasticsearch
• Mongo
• NetHttp
• Redis
• Resque
• Sidekiq

Change logger

By default RorVsWild uses Rails.logger or standard output. However in some cases you want to isolate RorVsWild's logs. To do that, you have to specifiy the log destination via the logger option :

# config/rorvswild.yml
production:
  api_key: API_KEY
  logger: log/rorvswild.yml

Here is the equivalent if you prefer initialising RorVsWild manually :

# config/initializers/rorvswild.rb
RorVsWild.start(api_key: "API_KEY", logger: "log/rorvswild.log")

In the case you want a custom logger such as Syslog, you can only do it by initialising it manually :

# config/initializers/rorvswild.rb
RorVsWild.start(api_key: "API_KEY", logger: Logger::Syslog.new)

Server metrics monitoring

We are adding server metrics as a beta feature. It monitors load average, CPU, memory, swap and disk space. For now, only Linux is supported. It has to be explicitly enabled with a feature flag :

# config/rorvswild.yml
production:
  api_key: API_KEY
  features:
    - server_metrics

Here is the equivalent if you prefer initialising RorVsWild manually :

# config/initializers/rorvswild.rb
RorVsWild.start(api_key: "API_KEY", features: ["server_metrics"])

The data are available in a server tab beside requests and jobs.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/rorvswild/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request