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Hafthor
Asked: 2009-07-28 13:58:12 +0800 CST

Monitoring Rails on Apache app performance

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What can I use to monitor my Rails on Passenger on Apache on CentOS web app?

I'm looking for something simple that will let me see real-time info on average requests/sec and average request time. Ideally, it would let me view that historically.

linux apache-2.2 monitoring ruby-on-rails phusion-passenger

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you have an existing monitoring and metrics solution such as cacti, ganglia or munin it should be possible to plug in apache stats (plugins for all of these for apache should exist) and passenger-status, plus adding your own custom application metrics. All of these provide historical aggregation via rrdtool.

    Cacti ApacheStats http://forums.cacti.net/files/apachestats08_b_414.png

    Cacti ApacheStats

    In addition to the mod_status based metrics such as the ApacheStats cacti plugin a more detailed method of getting data via custom logging is shown in R I Pienaar's blog about his ApacheBlackBox.

    The BlackBox (see O'Reilly Article) logs aim to capture:

    • Request type breakdown
    • 404 and 5xx error breakdown per site and per script/url
    • Average response time per site and per script
    • Connection type breakdown

    Apache Black Box ApacheBlackBox

    I've also heard good things being said about Scout which is rails specific and has plugins for Passenger but is paid for.

    Some examples of visualizations of operational data can be found at the Web Ops Viz Flickr Group

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  2. Paul gives some great recommendations. Another good option is NewRelic RPM, which is fantastic. It's very easy to install and use, and comes well-recommended by a number of heavy-hitters in the Rails community.

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  3. Have you guys checked out FiveRuns? http://www.fiveruns.com/ Its specifically made for monitoring Rails apps, and has a lot of great features to do so.

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