New Relic, Inc., the leading provider of Ruby on Rails application performance management solutions, today announced that it has released Version 1.3 of RPM™, the most widely-used tool for managing Ruby on Rails web applications. Attendees at RailsConf, the largest conference dedicated to Ruby on Rails, being held this week in Las Vegas, can see the new version at the New Relic booth in the exhibit hall.

"This version brings very important new capabilities for RPM," said Lewis Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic. "With this release we have enabled developers to have a closer working relationship with their peers on the management side of the business. Apdex and custom dashboards will allow developers to communicate important business metrics to the managers of their companies. We have also added a just-in-time capacity management function that allows application managers to know exactly how much capacity they are using, how much they need, and to get notified exactly when they need to deploy more. This makes cloud’s promise of dynamic capacity a reality."

Updates to RPM include the following:

Application Capacity Management

Each instance of an application consumes server capacity. Many applications require multiple processes to be deployed to handle the anticipated user traffic. Whether the application is deployed in a cloud infrastructure with highly dynamic management functions or deployed in a fixed number of servers at a hosting service, more application instance processes will result in higher hosting costs. RPM now allows continuous assessment of capacity utilization and enables RPM customers to right-size each application to the needed capacity. Application management teams can react more quickly to add or reduce capacity and find the balance between cost efficiency and high performance.

Apdex Support

RPM continuously scores applications or individual transaction types based on the end user’s experience using the Apdex performance index. Apdex is the first user experience metric that is comparable across all transactional applications. Using the Apdex score, developers and application owners can agree upon the response time goals for each application and have a simple metric which tells them whether they are achieving those goals. Additionally, an operations manager has a single measurement to compare performance across applications. Managers can quickly see which applications need improvement or investment, namely those that have a low Apdex value but are important to the business. RPM now includes the Apdex score in the application status dashboards and in more detailed reports. More information about Apdex or the Apdex Alliance can be found at www.apdex.org.

Custom Dashboard Creation Tools

With its unique visibility inside the running web application, RPM can provide continuous real-time monitoring of both application performance and transaction-level business performance. RPM customers can now quickly create their own dashboards with their preferred look and feel and include technical data and/or real time business information. For example, an e-commerce site can track numbers of new customer accounts, numbers of purchase transactions, returns, and cancellations and compare today’s data with same time last week or last month. All this can be done without any special new programs or databases. With real-time monitoring, business management can react quickly to changing customer behavior.