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Observe your web applications in the wild!
The MOle is a rack application that monitors user interactions with your web site. We are not talking about counting page hits here. The MOle tracks all the information available to capture the essence of a user interaction with your application. Using the MOle, you are able to see which feature is a hit or a bust. As an added bonus, the MOle also track performance and exceptions that might have escaped your test suites or alpha env. To boot your managers will love you for it! Whether you are releasing a new application or improving on an old one, it is always a good thing to know if anyone is using your application and if they are, how they are using it. What features are your users most fond of and which features find their way into the abyss? You will be able to rapidly assess whether or not your application is a hit and if your coolest features are thought as such by your users. You will be able to elegantly record user interactions and leverage these findings for the next iteration of your application.
Developer: Fernand Galiana Blog: http://www.liquidrail.com Site: http://rackamole.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/rackamole Forum: http://groups.google.com/group/rackamole Git: git://github.com/derailed/rackamole.git
Monitors any rack based framework such as Rails and Sinatra Captures the essence of the request as well as user information Tracks performance issues based on your latency threshold Tracks exceptions that might occurred during a request
Logging Hitimes mongo + mongo_ext Chronic Erubis Twitter4r Mail Growl
sudo gem install rackamole
Edit your environment.rb file and add the following lines:
require 'rackamole'
config.middleware.use Rack::Mole, { :app_name => "My Cool App", :user_key => :user_name }
This instructs the mole to start logging information to the console and look for the user name
in the session using the :user_name key. There are other options available, please take a look
at the docs for more information.
Given Rails exception handling logic, you can also edit your application_controller.rb file and
include the mole interceptor to trap exceptions in production environment
class ApplicationController
include Rackamole::Interceptor
This will instruct the mole to trap the raised exception from your rails stack.
Add the following lines in the config section and smoke it...
require 'rackamole'
configure do
use Rack::Mole, { :app_name => "My Sinatra App", :user_key => :user_name }
end
This assumes that you have session enabled to identify a user if not the mole will log the user
as 'Unknown'
Rackamole also comes with an option to specify a yaml config file to initialize the various settings. This comes in very handy when you need to specify different options depending on the environment you are operating in. Please see the spec/test_configs/rackamole_test.yml for an example.
Rackamole currently comes with a single storage strategy. More will come in the near future, but
currently we are using MongoDb as our default storage. The idea here is to create a database for
a given moled app per environment. For instance, for application 'Fred', you will need to use a
separate store for Fred running in alpha mode and Fred running in production mode.
In order to use a store, you will need to pass in the :store option. There currently 2 store
types a logger and a mongo adapter. By default the store is set to log moled information to the console.
To change to a mongo store simply add the following options:
use Rack::Mole, { :app_name => "Fred", :store => Rackamole::Store::MongoDb.new( :db_name => 'mole_fred_alpha_mdb' ) }
This expect a local mongo instance to be running on the default port. You can change the
location by adding :host and :port options.
NOTE: If you intend to use Wackamole please use the following mongo database naming convention
mole_{app_name}_{environment}_mdb
NOTE: Rackamole also provides for preventing certain sensitive params from being logged. You can specify
param_excludes or session_excludes as array of symbols to exclude specific request or session params.
Rackamole provides 3 different kind of alerting mechanisms: twitter, email, growl
Please see docs for the various configuration settings.
For example to setup email alerts, add the following lines in your rackamole config file.
# Email
email: &email
:from: 'rackamole@acme.com'
:to:
- 'fernand@acme.com'
- 'molley@acme.com'
:alert_on:
- <%=Rackamole.perf%>
- <%=Rackamole.fault%>
Then
# => Dev
development:
:app_name: Killer App
:user_key: :user_name
:email: *email
This will setup email alerts when rackamole detect performance or uncaught exceptions
(The MIT License)
Copyright © 2009
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
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