By Earlier this year, we introduced a new logging and performance monitoring tool, 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:
- 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!
- 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 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. Install a monitoring integration (such as our Ruby gem), select the matching dashboard, and you're done:
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":
You can tweak the query, review the results, and update the dashboard from there:
Automatic Rails instrumentation
The data that feeds the new Rails Dashboard is sent automatically from the
Honeybadger Ruby
gem
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
by adding the following to your honeybadger.yml config file:
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 and metrics will begin to appear in Honeybadger Insights, and your Rails dashboard will come alive!
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 guide.
Monitoring custom metrics
We also added some new methods to the Ruby gem to let you monitor custom
metrics in your Ruby
apps,
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:
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 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 with your feedback and suggestions.
