New Relic, Inc., the leading provider of Ruby on Rails application performance management solutions, today announced that it has released Version 1.2 of RPM, the most widely-used tool for managing Ruby on Rails web applications.

"We are very excited about this version of RPM," said Lewis Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic. "With this release we have enabled developers to collaborate more efficiently, integrate their other tools with RPM, and of course analyze and improve their applications more effectively. This release will allow our customers to make performance improvement part of every step of the application lifecycle."

Updates to RPM include the following:

Deployments Analysis and Tracking

The time following deployment of a new version of an application is critical as new bugs can immediately affect application performance and user experience. RPM now integrates with Capistrano or other deployment tools and collects relevant information about a new version to immediately detect problems in the new version. RPM allows detailed comparisons between application versions and maintains a record of past deployments to track progress from release to release.

Notes

Using RPM Notes, developers and operations teams can easily record a "journal" of an investigation or analysis of an application in a format that is easy to share with other members of the team. The Notes feature enables developers to capture RPM data graphs, annotate them with comments and observations, store them in a shared space and send them to colleagues. The performance metric data is retained along with the notes so they become an historical record of application issues and resolutions.

Integration with Other Development and Communication Tools

RPM now has points of integration with Twitter, Lighthouse and Campfire to enable the development team to be alerted to problems, open trouble tickets, and share RPM Notes.

Performance Data API

RPM can publish key performance metrics to other applications such as mobile devices, systems management consoles, desktop widgets, toolbars, etc.

Database Summary

RPM summarizes how the application is interacting with the database through ActiveRecord model operations. The chart shows a breakdown of database access based on model operations over a specified time period. Specific controller actions which experience poor database throughput can be identified for remediation. This enables the developers to identify trends in database improvement or deterioration and prioritize tuning activities.

Controller Summary

RPM summarizes the key performance metrics for an application’s controller actions. The chart is helpful for determining which controllers consume the most time, which are called the most and which have the greatest standard deviation. This enables the developers to prioritize their ongoing tuning efforts, set objectives and track results.