Exceptional Exceptions

This release changes how the status of requests that end up in an exception are measured. The ActionController measurement will set the status just like Rails.logger does for some "standard" exceptions like ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound or ActionController::RoutingError. Everything that isn't handled by default in Rails is reported as with a 500 status tag. This makes it easier to distinguish "standard' exceptions from "real" exceptional things.

After dropping support for Ruby 2.4 a while ago, we now require Ruby 2.5.

Bugfix boolean custom tags

Fix passing booleans to custom tags (#171)

Instrumentation Overdrive - influxdb-rails 1.0.1

Highlights

This release is adding three new types of instrumentation:

1. ActiveJob Instrumentation
   We now instrument all those pesky background jobs, so you can stay on top of what is happening in your ActiveJob queues. When have they been queued? How many are queued? How long did they take?

2. Block Instrumentation
   If you have some special devilish block of code you want to instrument the performance of, we now added a way for you to do that.

InfluxDB::Rails.instrument "expensive_operation", tags: { }, values: { } do
  expensive_operation
end

3. ActionMailer Instrumentation
   For those of you who send E-Mails (who doesn't?) we added instrumentation for ActionMailer that will tell you the throughput of your mailer classes.

4. A couple of new template dashboards based on the new measurements we produce
   See for yourself 👀

Minor Changes

We now also instrument ActiveRecord instantiation so you can hunt down the actions which are a bit too eager to load data.
Unhandled exceptions are now reported as a tag in the ActionController instrumentation, we don't really want to replace your exception tracking tool, but some statistics about this can't hurt right?

We also added support for more recent Ruby (2.7 / 3.0) and Ruby on Rails (6.0 / 6.1) versions.

Breaking Changes

But we also dropped support for Ruby 2.3, 2.4 and Rails 4.2, 5.0 and 5.1. If you are using those versions you should stay on influxdb-rails 1.0.0 and update soon, all of those are out of maintenance 😸

Thanks

This release would have been possible without you peepz! Thank you for your support ❤️

• Charlie Hornsby (@chornsby) of aiven.io for making the SSL client config more obvious
• Swapnil Gourshete (@gourshete) for documentation fixes
• Andrew Kalek (@anlek) for adding basic auth support for the connection to influxdb
• @SUSE for giving me leeway during #HackWeek to finally roll this!

Second 1.0.1 beta

One new subscriber: ActionMailer

1.0.1 Beta 1

First beta release of 1.0.1. Loads of new subscribers like ActiveRecord instantiation, all of ActiveJob and block instrumentation. Check it out and report problems

An all new influxdb-rails 1.0

This is the first stable release of the v1.0 branch of influxdb-rails. We have packed for you a lot of awesome features and bug fixes into 1.0. And we hope you'll enjoy using this as much as we have creating it!

⚠️ This is a complete new branch, it also includes a couple of breaking changes! ⚠️

New Features

Redesign of the Measurement Output

We switched from emitting eight different measurements based on Active Support Instrumentation hooks to one measurement called rails. We changed this to support easier aggregation across data in the rails measurement, to simplify our configuration and to stay closer to the InfluxDB/Grafana nomenclature.

You will need to update your dashboards, sorry for the inconvenience (see the Breaking Changes section).

A Sample Dashboard

Sending measurements to an InfluxDB is only half of the fun! 🤡 So this is the first version that includes a grafana dashboard. This dashboard tracks Ruby on Rails application performance based on the data we deliver with this gem.

Check out the sample-dashboard/ directory. We are really looking forward to collaborate with you on this. Let's build a the perfect Ruby on Rails dashboard together! 🤝

Easy custom Tags & Values

It's now way easier to include your own tags & values for measurements. Be it application wide (thank you @Kukunin for #47 💐) or per request!

New ActiveRecord and ActionView instrumentation

We have expanded the set of measurements to include also data from ActiveRecord and from ActionView so you get to know where your application really spends time on. Additionally to that the ActionController measurements now include more tags (method, status, format). And last but not least, all measurements now include the application name (thank you @stefanhorning for #44 💐). See our README.md for all the new goodness.

Breaking Changes

As this is a complete new branch it also includes a couple of breaking changes and you will have to update your configuration and your dashboards based on our data. We are sorry we have to put you through this...

Client Configuration

To simplify the configuration we have separated all of the influxdb-ruby client settings. Please update your configuration accordingly.

0.4.x	1.0.x
influxdb_database	client.database
influxdb_username	client.username
influxdb_password	client.password
influxdb_hosts	client.hosts
influxdb_port	client.port
async	client.async
use_ssl	client.use_ssl
retry	client.retry
open_timeout	client.open_timeout
read_timeout	client.read_timeout
max_delay	client.max_delay
time_precision	client.time_precision

Exceptions

To simplify our code base and in honor to the many Free Software exception trackers (errbit, sentry etc.), who do this job in a much nicer way, we have dropped the exceptions feature completely. So from this version on, we will not output anything into the rails.exceptions measurement anymore. We are sorry if you have relied on this and you now have to migrate to something else for exception tracking, but this was such an invasive code-path. We rather want to concentrate our resources on supporting more ActiveSupport Instrumentation hooks and data instead of this.

Measurement Output

As explained above, the measurement output changed. Below you find a table of what moved where.

0.4.x	1.0.x (measurement: rails)
measurement: rails.controller	tag-key: hook, tag-value: process_action, field-key: controller
measurement: rails.view	tag-key: hook, tag-value: process_action, field-key: view
measurement: rails.db	tag-key: hook, tag-value: process_action, field-key: db
measurement: rails.render_template	tag-key: hook, tag-value: render_template
measurement: rails.render_partial	tag-key: hook, tag-value: render_partial
measurement: rails.render_collection	tag-key: hook, tag-value: render_collection
measurement: rails.sql	tag-key: hook, tag-value: sql
measurement: rails.exceptions	Not Available anymore

See the InfluxDB Key Concepts documentation about what measurement, tag-key, tag-value and field-key mean.

Measurement Configuration

As explained above, a couple of configuration variables have changed. There is no need for you to do anything after the update but we list them here for completeness.

The following settings in your initializer don't have an effect anymore, you can remove them.

• series_name_for_controller_runtimes
• series_name_for_view_runtimes
• series_name_for_db_runtimes
• series_name_for_render_template
• series_name_for_render_partial
• series_name_for_render_collection
• series_name_for_sql
• series_name_for_exceptions
• series_name_for_instrumentation

And there are two new variables (with sensible defaults) that you can add to your initializer. You can use measurement_name = 'rails' to influence how the measurement we send is called. To disable measuring some specific hook (setting series_name_for_something = nil in 0.4x) you can use the variable ignored_hooks = ['sql.active_record', 'render_template.action_view']. See README.md#usage for the list of hooks we support.

Other breaking changes

• Support for Ruby <= 2.2.x has been removed
• Support for Rails <= 4.1.x has been removed
• Removed previously deprecated methods, if you still have them in your initializer they will now crash.
  • InfluxDB::Rails::Configuration#reraise_global_exceptions
  • InfluxDB::Rails::Configuration#database_name
  • InfluxDB::Rails::Configuration#application_id

Installation & Update

Please refer to README.md for everything else.

Hope this helps you instrument your Ruby on Rails application with Free Software! ❤️ - @ChrisBr, @hennevogel & @dmke