Introduction to New Relic for Ruby

The New Relic Ruby agent monitors your applications to help you identify and solve performance issues. You can also extend the agent's performance monitoring to collect and analyze business data to help you improve the customer experience and make data-driven business decisions.

Compatibility and requirements

The Ruby agent supports many of the most common Ruby frameworks and platforms. You can also use the Ruby agent in a Google App Engine (GAE) flexible environment. Before you install the Ruby agent, ensure your system meets the system requirements.

Monitor app performance

View the big picture of your app

• Monitor your app's Apdex (user satisfaction).
• Get a high-level summary of your app.
• Create architectural maps of your app.
• Enable distributed tracing to understand activity in an environment that relies on many services.
• Install New Relic Infrastructure and view detailed host data for your app.

Find errors and problems quickly

• Track key transactions.
• Create customized dashboards for important metrics.
• Alert your team when errors or problems occur before they affect your users.
• Track performance after a deployment.

Drill down into performance details

• Examine code-level transaction traces
• Examine database query traces.
• Examine error traces.
• Monitor Ruby background processes and daemons.

Analyze business data

Use the Ruby agent to organize, query, and visualize your data to answer key questions about application performance and customer experience.

• Use default transaction attributes or add your own.
• Query your data using NRQL.
• Send your own event data.
• Create and share customizable, interactive dashboards.

Install the agent

After creating a New Relic account, use our launcher or see the installation instructions.

Extend agent instrumentation

After installing the agent, go further and extend the agent's instrumentation:

• Page load timing: Automatically inject the browser monitoring agent to get visibility into end-user activity.
• Custom instrumentation: Instrument transactions not captured as part of our framework instrumentation.
• Agent API: Use the agent API to fully customize the agent's behavior. For example, you can collect custom metrics, flag an error, or ignore a particular transaction entirely.
• Custom metrics: Record additional metrics as part of a transaction to gain more insights into your app's performance and business data.
• Agent attributes: Customize the attributes attached to transactions. Customizing attributes allows you to avoid sending sensitive attributes, or to collect additional attributes for deeper visibility into your transactions.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter issues with the Ruby agent, see our full list of troubleshooting documentation. Common issues include:

• No data appears (Ruby)
• Gems incompatible with the Ruby agent
• Sending handled errors to New Relic
• Controlling when the Ruby agent starts

Check the source code

The Ruby agent is open source software. That means you can browse its source code and send improvements, or create your own fork and build it. For more information, see the README.