It is not a secret that New Relic has become an industry standard for web applications performance measurement among Ruby on Rails developers. Being a contributing member of Rails community, Railsware is not just an active New Relic user, but also a partner.

So, when we heard about New Relic introducing their new, open and extensible APM SaaS platform, decision on our participation in early testing has been made almost instantly.

WHAT WE’VE DONE

As a part of this testing, we’ve created a few simple plugins for Platform which could be valuable for New Relic users. Here they are.

• Haproxy: monitors HAProxy – a TCP/HTTP load balancer – and reports the following data for a specified proxy:
  • Error Rate (per-min)
  • Proxy Status
  • Request Rate (per-min)
  • Active Servers
  • Sessions Active
  • Sessions Queued
• Resque: monitors Resque – a library for processing background jobs – and reports the following data for a specified instance:
  • Number of working workers
  • Pending jobs number
  • Total failed jobs number
  • Queues number
  • Number of workers
  • Number of processed jobs
• Processor statistics (mpstat): reports the following MP statistics: user, nice, sys, iowait, irq, soft, steal, idle, intros.
• Logwatcher: monitors the specified log file and reports the rate of occurrences of a provided term.
  Logwatcher is a perfect plugin for error tracking. For example, you have a web application that occasionally generates an error and you log these errors to a file.Let’s say you proceed the error info with [Error]. So, an error might look like this: [Error] Bats in the belfry
  To track the rate of errors you just need to install the plugin and provide the following options:
  log_path: /var/log/app.log
  term: “[Error]”

HOW TO SET THIS UP

After you create your New Relic account – find “Plugins” menu item in left navigation side bar, choose plugin you are interested in and follow to the further install instructions.

At Railsware, we’ve been using New Relic for quite a while now and, in our opinion, SaaS Platform launch is a huge step forward in the process of growing New Relic to a solid monitoring solution.

Yet, there’s still some space for Platform usability enhancement and we hope New Relic team will keep working on and improving this solution. As a New Relic partner, we will always provide a constructive feedback, suggestions and validations to the New Relic team. And it is our strong belief that so will other New Relic users and partners.