Monitoring your application can be a difficult task if you're just getting started with it. You need to know which metrics matter most and understand which ones you can combine into meaningful graphs.

In the (not just holiday ⛄️) spirit of making things smoother for our users, we’ve added a magic dashboard to the Ruby integration that shows you the volume of emails you are sending with ActionMailer.

Magic Dashboards

During the setup process, our agent scans your app infrastructure. Once it figures out which tools you're using, it automatically instruments some parts of your app and instantly creates the most important dashboards (we call them Magic Dashboards), so that you can monitor what matters most with 0 setup time.

For the Ruby integration we'll set up your Magic Dashboards for background jobs through Sidekiq, databases like Mongo, and web servers like Puma.

Making Things Easy for Ruby on Rails Users

It's already possible to monitor how much email is being sent with Rails through the "background" namespace on AppSignal, where you can see how often a specific mailer was called.

However, this requires filtering of the background jobs and it's hard to get a sense of the kind of emails that are being sent. We decided to make it easier and more detailed than that. In the case of AppSignal monitoring AppSignal itself, it's important to monitor email traffic and it's nice to be able to see the distribution between Error, Performance and Anomaly detection emails.

ActionMailer Magic Dashboard in AppSignal

When updating to the latest Ruby integration (2.11.1 or better), you will see a new magic dashboard for ActionMailer metrics. This dashboard allows you to keep track of the amount of times a certain mailer was called and see the distribution between the different mailers in your application.

The ActionMailer dashboard plots the following data:

• ActionMailer Deliveries Delivery throughput per ActionMailer class/method (e.g. Usermailer#welcome)
• ActionMailer Deliveries Delivery throuhput distribution shown in percentage between the different mailers

The graphs are split out by ActionMailer class/method:

If you are already on Ruby integration 2.11.1 or better, the Magic Dashboard will appear automatically as soon as we detect new ActionMailer calls

Setting a Trigger to Send Out an Alert

Another cool thing that becomes easier with the data in graphs is setting triggers for it and sending out alerts when these are triggered.

For example, when the throughput goes over or under a certain threshold, this is something to consider setting a trigger for. To do so, click the three dots on the right top of the graph and start the trigger setup.

Try AppSignal: Monitoring Made Easy And Sweet 🍪

If you haven't used AppSignal before, now you know how we save you time by making monitoring easier. We'd love you to try us out. When you do, feel free to reach out, we'll send you a free box of stroopwafels as well.