--- title: Curated dashboards in Honeybadger published: "2024-06-14" publisher: Honeybadger author: Joshua Wood category: Company updates tags: - Honeybadger - Logging - Observability - Ruby - Rails - DevOps description: "With all your data in one place, Honeybadger is quickly becoming the only monitoring tool you need to keep your web applications healthy and your users happy—and with curated dashboards, it's never been easier to get started!" url: "https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/curated-dashboards/" --- Earlier this year, we [introduced a new logging and performance monitoring tool](https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/insights/), Honeybadger Insights. You can finally send your logs, application events, and telemetry data to Honeybadger! Once you do, you can query your logs and events to diagnose performance issues, perform root-cause analyses, and create beautiful charts and dashboards to see what's happening in real time. We first launched Insights as a general-purpose tool in your monitoring toolkit; you could use it for many different things, but _how_ you used it was up to you. Today, we're introducing two new features that make it much easier to get started: 1. **Pre-built performance dashboards.** Instead of creating a dashboard from scratch, you can now choose from several pre-built dashboards curated by our team—with more to come! 2. **Automatic instrumentation for Rails.** Our Ruby gem now automatically reports events and metrics from Rails, which we're using to power a brand-new _Rails Performance Dashboard_. ## The Rails Performance Dashboard When [creating a dashboard](https://docs.honeybadger.io/guides/insights/#working-with-dashboards) in Honeybadger, you now have several options to choose from: - **Empty dashboard:** A blank slate dashboard. - **Honeybadger dashboard:** Visualize your Honeybadger data, including errors and uptime monitoring. - **Heroku dashboard:** Monitor your Heroku apps. - **Rails dashboard:** A drop-in performance dashboard for Rails. Our team curates each dashboard to make it easy for you to get started with Honeybadger and [_BadgerQL_](https://docs.honeybadger.io/guides/insights/badgerql/). Install a monitoring integration (such as our Ruby gem), select the matching dashboard, and you're done: ![Screenshot of a Rails performance dashboard displaying various metrics including total requests, response distributions, controller durations, responses by status codes, slowest partials, and slowest controller actions.](https://www-files.honeybadger.io/posts/curated-dashboards/rails-performance-dashboard.jpg)_Honeybadger's new Rails Performance Dashboard_ Once you create a dashboard, you don't have to keep the defaults—we designed Honeybadger dashboards to be customized! In fact, reading the underlying queries is a great way to learn BadgerQL. To see the query and raw data behind any dashboard widget, click "Open in Query Editor": ![Table displaying the slowest SQL queries with average durations in milliseconds, alongside an "Open in Query Editor" button for detailed inspection.](https://www-files.honeybadger.io/posts/curated-dashboards/open-in-query-editor.jpg) You can tweak the query, review the results, and update the dashboard from there: ![An interface for running and analyzing SQL queries with filters, displaying the slowest query executions along with their average durations and details.](https://www-files.honeybadger.io/posts/curated-dashboards/query-in-editor.jpg) ## Automatic Rails instrumentation The data that feeds the new Rails Dashboard is sent automatically from the [Honeybadger Ruby gem](https://docs.honeybadger.io/lib/ruby/getting-started/introduction/) starting in version 5.11.x—so make sure you upgrade to the latest version. After you upgrade, you'll also need to [enable the Honeybadger Insights instrumentation for Ruby](https://docs.honeybadger.io/lib/ruby/getting-started/sending-events-to-insights/) by adding the following to your `honeybadger.yml` config file: ```yaml insights: enabled: true ``` We'll enable this feature in a future gem version by default, but you must opt in for now. After deploying the new Rails instrumentation, some new [events](https://docs.honeybadger.io/lib/ruby/getting-started/sending-events-to-insights/#event-captures) and [metrics](https://docs.honeybadger.io/lib/ruby/getting-started/collecting-and-reporting-metrics/#metric-collection) will begin to appear in Honeybadger Insights, and your Rails dashboard will come alive! ![Screenshot of an observability platform showing event logs with timestamps and JSON data, detailing SQL queries and partial renders with durations.](https://www-files.honeybadger.io/posts/curated-dashboards/insights-observability-events.jpg) We also added some new configuration and documentation to help you customize the events you care about. To learn more, check out our new [Sending Events to Insights](https://docs.honeybadger.io/lib/ruby/getting-started/sending-events-to-insights/) guide. ## Monitoring custom metrics We also added some new methods to the Ruby gem to let you [monitor custom metrics in your Ruby apps](https://docs.honeybadger.io/lib/ruby/getting-started/collecting-and-reporting-metrics/#manually-collecting-your-own-metrics), including Gauge, Timer, Counter, and Histogram. For example, to monitor the duration of some code execution over time, use the `time` method to create a new Timer: ```ruby Honeybadger.time('process_application', ->{ application.process }) ``` When you collect metrics using the Honeybadger gem, the gem will aggregate data by default and report the results to Insights every 60 seconds. Aggregation means you can sample as often as you want while efficiently using your daily data quota. For a list of metrics that Honeybadger collects automatically—and to learn how to send your own—check out our new [Collecting and Reporting Metrics](https://docs.honeybadger.io/lib/ruby/getting-started/collecting-and-reporting-metrics/) guide. ## More to come If you don't use Ruby—don't worry. We'll be adding curated dashboards for more frameworks and platforms. In the meantime, we'll keep working to improve Honeybadger day by day! As always, we'd love to hear from you. [Send us an email](https://www.honeybadger.io/contact/) with your feedback and suggestions. --- ## Try Honeybadger for FREE Intelligent logging, error tracking, and Just Enough APM™ in one dev-friendly platform. Find and fix problems before users notice. [Start free trial](https://app.honeybadger.io/users/sign_up) [See plans and pricing](https://www.honeybadger.io/plans/)