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Dash is ready for Public Beta, with a brand new look!

2009-06-24T16:27:00Z

I know we have been quiet for a while, but we have been working diligently to make Dash even better. Now we are ready to show off some of those results.

Those of you who have been using Dash will have seen some significant changes recently. If you’re new to Dash, keep reading for some of the highlights of our redesign effort.

First of all, a couple of nomenclature changes.

Applications are now Sources. A Source is anything that you want to get data out of and put into Dash. Previously, we used the term Application, but we realized with the extensibility of Dash, applications were only a subset of what you could monitor. Sources include applications, but may include other services, like Google Analytics, GetSatisfaction, or even your Cucumber test suite.

Recipes are now Packages. We’re brainstorming ways to improve the way custom metrics and reports are collected and organized. We’ll post more about it here when we’ve got a better idea about how it’s going to shape up. In the mean-time, rest assured we’ll provide an upgrade path for anyone who has already built custom metrics or wants to get started now.

A new look and new features

We’ve made the look and feel of Dash cleaner, more elegant, and more pleasant to use.

Improved Navigation: The redesign of Dash has primarily been about making it easier to move around; we’ve worked hard to improve the navigation. The tabs and breadcrumbs make it easy to move around and always find your way home. We’ve also made important features even easier to access; for example, you can select or add a new Report or Source from any page.

Quick Access to Metrics: We added a Metrics tab where you can see exactly what data is being collected from your Sources, and filter on how fresh or stale the data is. You can view ad hoc metrics without adding them to a report. Once you view the metric, you can easily add the metric to a report.

Most of the functional changes you’ll see in this release center around our reports; just about everything reports-related has been streamlined.

Managing Reports: Now, you can share a report by clicking on the sharing icon in the report name header, and you can choose your Home Report (the report you see after sign-in or by clicking on the Dash logo). The buttons are located right where you need them, from any report.

Creating Reports: To make viewing new sources faster than ever, we now notify you when you have a source with fresh data that is not visible in any report. From this notification, you can create a report pre-populated with all the data from that source. Additionally, when creating a new report you can use this same ability to pre-populate the report with all the data from a source of your choosing.

Some things never change

You can still measure anything by creating your own custom metrics.
You can still decide how you want to receive your event notifications (email, Campfire, Twitter).
You decide what is important.
You can still create your own packages to collect data from other sources. You don’t have to wait for us to do it.

So check out the all new Dash and tell us what you think!

Join us at RailsConf/CabooseConf and we will take you to see Penn & Teller

2009-05-01T21:20:00Z

Attending RailsConf and/or CabooseConf? Join FiveRuns to see Penn & Teller perform at the Rio on Tuesday night.

We’ve got transportation and 40 tickets to catch Penn & Teller at the Rio on Tuesday night. Want to join us? Drop your name in the… hat. Okay, it’s not a hat, but you get the idea.

Enter your name before 8am Tuesday morning; winners will be notified by 10am via email.

See you in Las Vegas!

Dash Pricing and Feature Survey

2009-04-14T19:58:00Z

For the last few days, we’ve been running a survey to get some customer validation data on our pricing and features for Dash, and the response has been great. Since it’s only been a few days, I don’t want to bias anything by giving out interim results. Instead, I wanted to encourage Dash users to take the survey – it takes most people less than 1 minute.

So – please login to Dash and give us some feedback, it’ll be quick!

Also – a shout-out to the folks at SurveyGizmo: we met up with them at the FiveRuns, OtherInbox and Austin on Rails SXSWi 2009 party and now I can say from experience – it’s a great app. and I recommend using it.

Fluid icons for Dash

2009-04-11T00:57:00Z

There’s no denying it’s handy to have Dash up on a monitor somewhere in the office, and some of our more enterprising users have even thrown it into Fluid to give it a nice, built-in feel.

To those users: We salute you… and here’s some icons.

Friday Picks

2009-03-20T23:10:00Z

The music last night was great. I didn’t get to see a lot of the bands I wanted to – the line to get into Stubb’s was far longer than I had the patience for.

Tonight’s Picks:

My plan is The Love Language, The Postelles, Amazing Baby, Airborne Toxic Event & New York Dolls. I would love to catch the end of Primal Scream, but not sure I can make it LZR from 5th & Trinity, but we will see.

I have to miss SXSW on Saturday, so there may or may not be picks.

Hope everyone is having a great time!

SXSW Music

2009-03-19T21:49:00Z

One of the things I love about living in Austin is the SXSW Music Festival. I have my wristband on and I am ready to go.

Here is my wish list for tonight.

The most likely scenario is Cl�, The Soft Pack, Andrew Bird, +/- and then home. Got to get up early and take my seat in Campfire.

Hope you enjoy!

dash-javascript, let me show you it

2009-03-11T19:36:00Z

dash-javascript is our latest little invention. It’s a bit different from dash-ruby, dash-python, et al.; those are about sending data to Dash. dash-javascript is about pulling data from Dash.

We’ve built dash-javascript because we know that Dash isn’t where everyone wants to see their data. Many apps have an admin backend, or even a custom dashboard pulling some ad-hoc metrics. There’s no reason those folks should have to log into Dash to get their numbers. We also know that ya’ll love showing off your feats of optimization with pretty graphs. Who are we to stand in your way?

So, dash-javascript gives you access to data from your Dash apps in whatever app you want. Suppose you’ve got something like this in your app’s administration backend:

<div id="health">
  CPU value: 
</div>

You can insert the latest CPU value for your app with this bit of jQuery-flavored JavaScript:

$('#health').dash({fetch: 'latest', token: 'your-read-token', metric: 'cpu'},
  function(value) {
    $(this).append(value);
  });

That’s it. You’re free to display data however you like. Throw it into a DOM element (as above), graph it with your favorite canvas or Flash-based charts or do whatever fits your taste.

Consider this an early-access preview. The API for this will change depending on what people need. We’re also planning on building easily embedded widgets, so if there’s any particular visualization you’d like to see, let us know!

You can get dash-javascript via GitHub; it’s even documented! If you have questions or feedback, we’d love to hear it.

FiveRuns SXSW Happy Hour

2009-03-09T21:25:00Z

If you’re going to be in Austin for SXSW, join FiveRuns, OtherInbox and Austin on Rails for our annual Beer on Rails Happy Hour. We’ll have drinks, appetizers, and tons of games so you and all Ruby on Rails enthusiasts can meet, greet and have a great time. RSVP to sxsw@fiveruns.com.

FiveRuns will also be giving away limited edition t-shirts to the first 100 people, so get there early!

Two new UI features

2009-03-03T03:04:00Z

Today we released an update to the Dash UI with two major features.

The Administrator Role

In previous incarnations of the UI, there were only two user levels; Application owners and members. In this update, we add a new user level, administrators.

We’re not crazy about complex roles and rights systems, so we’ve kept things simple. Administrators have all the rights of an Owner except the ability to delete the application or remove the owner from the application. They have access to the rest of the application’s configuration, including the setup details and sharing functions. These are people you trust… a lot. Hopefully this will make life a little easier for teams sharing applications.

There are a lot of report sharing-related features planned for the near future. Stay tuned.

Goodbye Metric Browser, Hello Metric Search

In the past, we had an odd metric browsing widget used when adding metrics to sparkline boxes and modifying line graphs, broken down by application and recipe. It was definitely useful, but the design made finding specific metrics difficult (especially if you have a large set like we do), and it presented certain challenges to nice features we have planned down the road.

So, today we’ve scuttled the metric browser in favor of a simple search function (by metric or recipe, in a single app or across all). We’ll continue to build out the search function and work towards making reports easier to build and administer.

Opening the doors a bit

The recent article on RubyInside has given us a nice, fresh set of beta invitation requests. We’ll be contacting you shortly!

Dash & Sensor - Cucumber metrics with Dash & Behavior Driven Ops

2009-03-02T18:07:00Z

Bradley Taylor (of RailsMachine) has come up with two new uses for Dash and Sensor plugins – both of which are great illustrations of the potential in the Dash service.

In Cucumber metrics with Dash: Bradley describes how he uses Dash to visualize the results of running Cucumber (i.e. passing, failing, skipped, and pending steps.).

In Testing Dash Metrics with Cucumber Bradley is using Cucumber with the output of Dash so that …

instead of writing boring monitoring plugins from scratch, you can now do behavior driven ops! Transform from a grumpy, misanthropic sysadmin to a hipster, agile developer instantly.

Stay tuned for more examples & feel free to let us know how you’re using Dash (at support.fiveruns.com) and we will pass them on to the community.

Ye Ol Scroll of Shameful Tunes

2009-02-27T13:00:00Z

For some reason, we’ve taken to singing / playing obnoxious songs to each other. To memoralize these songs, we wrote up the Ye Ol Scroll of Shameful Tunes. Just before the board was erased, I captured the final list:

Sad Trombone
Spanish Flea
Hokey Pokey
Never Gonna to Give You Up
Live is a Battlefield
It’s Raining Men (Halalujah!)
It’s Business Time
The Bird is the Word
How Bizarre
Banana Phone

Feel free to sing one of these songs to someone – at just the right time.

Dash and Merb

2009-02-25T17:37:00Z

One of the great things about Dash is its flexibility. This flexibility allows us to instrument app frameworks pretty quickly, and with the way our support for custom recipes is designed, it’s simple to mix-and-match metrics to get a better view of what’s going on with your application—in terms of its performance and business goals.

It was easy to get Dash working with Merb 1.0.x, and we’d like to announce our support for the framework, to include:

Drop-in, simple installation similar to our Rails installation process
Support for auto-adding our recipes for ActiveRecord or DataMapper (anyone want Sequel? Let us know!)
Full-support for your own custom metric recipes and reports, as usual
Identifying slow/frequent actions to target for performance fixes
Smart exception capturing and notification via Twitter, Campfire, and Email
Deployment tracking (with special support to link to GitHub to view the commit), notification via Twitter, Campfire, and Email

This is just the beginning.

Want in on the private Beta? Request an invitation.

As with the rest of our Dash instrumentation, the fiveruns-dash-merb gem is made available via GitHub under an MIT-style license. Community contributions are welcomed!

Numbers You Care About

2009-02-24T21:11:00Z

One of the key features I love about Dash is collecting the numbers I care about. I tend to work on lower level portions of the systems here at FiveRuns and one of the daemons I wrote is the Loader daemon which takes the payloads uploaded to Dash and stuffs them into the database. To this end, I’m really only concerned about two numbers:

How many payloads did the system load in the last minute? (aka Loaded Payloads)
How long did this take? (aka Load Time)

Recently I tuned the common path for the Loader and deployed it. Since we use Dash to track itself, I could see the resulting change to the load times almost immediately. A shiny nickel if you can figure out when I deployed the change.

What’s great about this is it is independent of any ORM library or framework. You don’t need to run Rails or even ActiveRecord. I could switch the Loader to use DataMapper tomorrow and my numbers will continue to work perfectly. Getting that number took one line of Ruby:


  recipe.time :total_time, 'Load Time', :method => 'Loader::Engine#load'

That line just tells Dash to track the amount of time the process spends in the load method. This notion of user-configurable metrics is the fundamental power of Dash: you can specify the few critical numbers you need to know to do your job, without the extraneous fluff.

Automatic Rails Applications

2009-02-23T16:16:00Z

Welcome to the third installment of configuration-automation, a Ruby on Rails environment setup script. We’ll take a remote Linux server from first boot to fully configured, live Rails application server with just a hostname and password. This version includes a menu of Rails applications to choose from and replaces the nginx/mongrel servers with Phusion Passenger. Four popular Rails applications: Radiant, Spree, jobberRails and El Dorado are available to be deployed automatically.

What’s Needed

All you need is Capistrano and git installed on your *nix client to download and execute the scripts. On the remote server, Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10 with ssh listening is supported, such as a Slicehost VM or VMWare image.

Using The Script

Just download the files from github and run:

git clone git://github.com/mmond/configuration-automation.git
cd ./configuration-automation
git checkout -b origin/production-v1
sh configure_ubuntu.sh

What Happens

An ssh connection to the Ubuntu server updates core system libraries and installs dependencies such as Ruby and MySQL. The Rails application chosen is deployed via Capistrano with a second ssh connection. Each connection requires the target server’s password or you can install an ssh key pair to skip those prompts.

To install additional Rails applications to the newly configured server, run configure_rails_apps.sh from the same ./configuration-automation directory. The main script can also be rerun from the same directory against other blank Ubuntu targets.

And Why?

With no DSL to learn or manifests to build, this is a fast, simple way to bootstrap a Rails server. I built it to test (and quickly retest) compatibility with FiveRuns Manage and TuneUp product updates. As such, it makes a decent acceptance test environment builder. It is also a way to experiment with a functioning Ruby on Rails app server without working through every installation issue.

It’s not intended to meet the meet the same needs as more powerful tools like Puppet, or now Chef, though you could easily add these after running configuration-automation. For EC2 environments, also check out Matt Conway’s cool Rubber Capistrano/Rails plugin.

The Rails app versions are frozen to today to ensure their project updates don’t break the automation. I’ll refresh these in later updates to configuration-automation. Suggestions and feedback are welcome via comments below or on my site.

Using Dash Sensor

2009-02-19T17:33:00Z

Dash gathers and tracks your metrics. Some of those metrics might be easily accessible from your Ruby or Python applications but there’s a whole host of metrics that can’t be gathered directly from your application. That’s why we created Dash Sensor, a daemon with an extensible plugin architecture. We’ve built plugins for pulling metrics from nginx, apache, memcached and starling and use those to monitor our own Dash infrastructure. Here’s a few nginx numbers from our staging environment, e.g. 33 requests in the last minute:

Sensor is Ruby-based so the plugins are written in Ruby and they can do anything you can dream of: access a SOAP or REST web service, query a billing database, or process EDI documents from your System/360 mainframe. Fortunately for my own sanity, that last one is left as an exercise to the reader.

So go ahead and experiment with Sensor. The existing plugins are for common technical infrastructure like Apache and memcached but we believe the more interesting ones are the custom ones you can write to monitor and track your own business. Good luck and happy measuring!