Digging Deep with ActiveSupport::Notifications
Presenter: Matt Sanders
Matt Sanders (@nextmat) is a Senior Software Engineer at Librato, Inc, where he works on the Metrics real-time monitoring platform and dreams of making your data beautiful. He’s been active in the Ruby community since 2005 and is a regular contributor to open-source projects including compass-960 and excon. On sunny days he can be found chasing waves on the Texas coast.
Rails 3 and above includes a powerful instrumentation system, ActiveSupport::Notifications, which can be used to track performance and event information for all aspects of your application. Notifications are light-weight, easy to setup, and can be consumed by multiple subscribers (logs, audit trails, consolidated metrics, other parts of your application).
In this session we’ll start with the basics of ActiveSupport::Notifications and work our way to powerful advanced use cases. Topics we’ll explore include:
- How to set up and use notifications
- Logging what you want from any tier of your system
- How to capture and aggregate performance/business data for the metrics you care about most
- Conditional monitoring in production: flag on and off data by system or customer to get to the root of problems more quickly
- Using ActiveSupport::Notifications in non-Rails applications and your own libraries
