Digging Deep with ActiveSupport::Notifications

Rails 3 and above includes a powerful instrumentation system, ActiveSupport::Notifications, which can be used to track performance and event information for all aspects of your application. Notifications are light-weight, easy to setup, and can be consumed by multiple subscribers (logs, audit trails, consolidated metrics, other parts of your application).

In this session we’ll start with the basics of ActiveSupport::Notifications and work our way to powerful advanced use cases. Topics we’ll explore include:

• How to set up and use notifications
• Logging what you want from any tier of your system
• How to capture and aggregate performance/business data for the metrics you care about most
• Conditional monitoring in production: flag on and off data by system or customer to get to the root of problems more quickly
• Using ActiveSupport::Notifications in non-Rails applications and your own libraries