New Relic is looking to capitalize on the growing number of Ruby on Rails application deployments, having recently raised $3.5M from Benchmark Capital for their Rails Performance Management (RPM) product.
RPM is a combination of installed software and cloud services that helps developers understand performance problems in their RoR applications. A Rails developer first installs a standard plugin that continuously sends performance data to New Relic’s servers. He or she can then use an RPM dashboard to identify the specific points in their code that are causing bottlenecks.
Several brand name Rails developers are already using a beta version of the RPM service, including Rails core developer Rick Olson. While the company is reluctant to disclose its current enterprise-size clients, they are obviously going after the several billion-dollar-plus businesses already using Rails in production.
New Relic was founded by Lewis Cirne, who in 1998 started a company that offered similar monitoring software for the then-young Java application industry. Cirne successfully sold that company and has brought several of his old colleagues with him to this new Rails venture.
Other startups working to make Rails deployment less painful include Heroku, which offers online development and one-click cloud deployment, and Engine Yard, which offers managed Rails service infrastructure.
New Relic seems to be SaaS type service. Traditionally these kind of performance tuning tools are stand alone software that must be installed on our own system. Such tools comes handy for development environments. I know that many performance tuning and debugging tools for Java are standalone apps. There is nothing good or bad but this is a new approach.
Wow Coooooool!!!
http://technoq.blogspot.com
Once more company that should be listed is fiveruns (direct competitor to newrelic, unlike the other two companies mentioned, which are hosting companies).
I have no affiliation other than being a satisfied customer of fiveruns. More rails performance monitoring tools (and competition between them) are always good … I’ll definitely try newrelic out.
People of the thread: what other rails performance monitoring / analysis tools should have been mentioned in the article?
“several billion dollar plus businesses”? Care to name a few?
> “several billion dollar plus businesses”? Care to name a few?
+1
I’d like to hear who these businesses are too…
Very interesting concept. Are there similar things for PHP apps?
@mark and @yongfook: see the excellent post by Obie Fernandez: http://blog.obiefernandez.com/.....ompan.html
You do know that there’s another one in there called Morph eXchange, right Mark!
Check ‘em out morpheXchange.com
@Jason: Zend Platform has similar functionality for PHP servers called “PHP Intelligence”
http://www.zend.com/en/product.....phpmonitor
Disclaimer: I work for Zend
Monitoring Ruby on Rails Performance…
Performance status: Horrible
There’s also Scout: scoutapp.com
There’s also: morphexchange.com
I will need to check out, but so far i’ve been very happy with http://www.iopus.com/imacros/web-testing.htm
iMacros performance measurements reflect the true user experience as they are measured using a real browser. Plus, it works with any technology (AJAX, Flash,…).
i need to study zend the rail is beyond my brainstem function
any good books or tutorials out there?
looking to create some web 2.0 startups via php
A “standard” plugin (sounds innocuous enough) “continuously sends data to New Relic’s servers.”
Am I the only one who envisions a potential performance hit here? I would never use a remote monitor for performance metrics unless those being measured were in terms of remote usability. I can see this being a for-pay version of “the site is slow.”
Spongecell has been using newrelic for a few months now. It’s come in very handy for quickly diagnosing slowness on the site.
I’m at one of those $B+ businesses, but I’m not sure I can disclose the name at this point. We’re 3B+ and using RoR in a few internal and external apps.
@Jason: The mod_top project has something similar (although without the pretty graphs) for PHP. http://www.mod-top.org