New Relic, Inc. today announced it has expanded RPM, the Rails performance monitoring tool that helps developers find and fix problems in real time, by introducing new features aimed at providing both deeper visibility and greater operations-level analysis of Rails applications. The new features, which enable Rails developers to keep performance humming so their applications can scale, are available immediately as part of the Bronze, Silver, and Gold subscription levels for RPM.

"As a Rails application grows, diagnosing performance problems becomes more complex," said New Relic Founder & CEO Lew Cirne. "RPM helps developers quickly diagnose problems, so growth doesn’t come at the expense of performance. Powerful new features like Transaction Tracing and Error Tracking provide unparalleled visibility into running applications. Scalability Analysis, weekly trending views, and Automated Incident Detection help team members with a more operational focus. These features make New Relic RPM the must-have tool for anyone deploying serious Rails applications."

Updates to RPM include the following:

Transaction Tracing

Transaction Tracing provides a deep drilldown into your application’s slowest individual transactions. Developers can explore the Controllers, Models, and Views called during a transaction, and can drill down into the SQL of every database query and into a SQL EXPLAIN for the slowest queries.

"Transaction Tracing helped us in a critical moment," said Tobi Lütke, Founder and CEO jadedPixel and Rails Core Team Member. "After getting multiple reports of problems with our application’s responsiveness, we decided to invest in more hardware. We didn’t have the manpower to investigate the problem. Then we tried Transaction Tracing. It did all the work for us, leading us to implement a few key performance improvements. The problems went away, and we haven’t had to buy new hardware since."

Error Tracking

Rails developers’ mailboxes overflow with production error reports-rendering those reports nearly useless. RPM breaks through the clutter by capturing, tracking, and classifying these errors, presenting them alongside performance and availability data.

"Before RPM, many of our customers were simply overwhelmed by the volume of error notifications arriving in their inboxes through RSS," said Bill Kayser, Lead Developer for New Relic. "Some had given up reading errors altogether and instead relied on the rate at which their inbox message count increased to indicate a problem. RPM Error Tracking classifies and groups all errors so developers can quickly pinpoint any smoking guns."

Automated Incident Detection

Red flags and RSS feeds alert developers automatically when incidents occur. Developers can see incidents within a selected time window, and can click on an incident to see relevant data for both the current time period and for the same period last week, all without doing any configuration.

Scalability Analysis

Scalability Analysis shows team members with an operational focus how response time, CPU, and database utilization scale as application load increases. Scalability Analysis provides Rails development and operations teams the data they need to establish their application’s scalability and to locate overall scaling bottlenecks.

Enhanced Data Granularity and Retention

All versions of New Relic RPM have expanded capability to collect and store performance data ranging from a week’s worth of data storage at the Bronze level to three months at the Gold level. All subscription levels collect performance data in one-minute increments.

Additionally, all RPM subscriptions include weekly email reports summarizing your application’s performance over the past week; and iPhone access for performance information on the go.

RPM supports mongrel, Thin, Passenger (aka mod_rails), Litespeed, and JRuby/Glassfish.

How to Get RPM

• To learn more about RPM and to subscribe, visit https://newrelic.com/web-app-monitoring-pricing.html.
• Developers can also plug in to RPM Lite for free, unlimited use in production. Sign up by visiting https://newrelic.com/RPMlite.html