This gem works together with the Rails Autoscale Heroku add-on to automatically scale your web and worker dynos as needed. It gathers a minimal set of metrics for each request (and job queue), and periodically posts this data asynchronously to the Rails Autoscale service.
- Rack-based app
- Ruby 2.5 or newer
Add this line to your application's Gemfile and run bundle:
gem 'rails_autoscale_agent'This inserts the agent into your Rack middleware stack.
The agent will only communicate with Rails Autoscale if a RAILS_AUTOSCALE_URL ENV variable is present, which happens automatically when you install the Heroku add-on. The middleware does nothing if RAILS_AUTOSCALE_URL is not present, such as in development or a staging app.
You'll need to require 'rails_autoscale_agent/middleware' and insert the RailsAutoscaleAgent::Middleware manually. Insert it before Rack::Runtime to ensure accuracy of request queue timings.
The middleware agent runs in its own thread so your web requests are not impacted. The following data is submitted periodically to the Rails Autoscale API:
- Ruby version
- Rails version
- Gem version
- Dyno name (example: web.1)
- PID
- Collection of queue time measurements (time and milliseconds)
Rails Autoscale aggregates and stores this information to power the autoscaling algorithm and dashboard visualizations.
Most Rails Autoscale configurations are handled via the settings page on your Rails Autoscale dashboard, but there a few ways you can directly change the behavior of the agent via environment variables:
RAILS_AUTOSCALE_DEBUG- Enables debug logging. See more in the logging section below.RAILS_AUTOSCALE_WORKER_ADAPTER- Overrides the available worker adapters. See more in the worker adapters section below.RAILS_AUTOSCALE_LONG_JOBS- Enables reporting for active workers. See Handling Long-Running Background Jobs in the Rails Autoscale docs for more.RAILS_AUTOSCALE_MAX_QUEUES- Worker metrics will only report up to 50 queues by default. If you have more than 50 queues, you'll need to configure this settings or reduce your number of queues.
Rails Autoscale supports autoscaling worker dynos. Out of the box, four job backends are supported: Sidekiq, Resque, Delayed Job, and Que. The agent will automatically enable the appropriate worker adapter based on what you have installed in your app.
In some scenarios you might want to override this behavior. Let's say you have both Sidekiq and Resque installed 🤷♂️, but you only want Rails Autoscale to collect metrics for Sidekiq. Here's how you'd override that:
heroku config:add RAILS_AUTOSCALE_WORKER_ADAPTER=sidekiq
You can also disable collection of worker metrics altogether:
heroku config:add RAILS_AUTOSCALE_WORKER_ADAPTER=""
It's also possible to write a custom worker adapter. See these docs for details.
Once installed, you should see something like this in your development log:
[RailsAutoscale] Reporter not started: RAILS_AUTOSCALE_URL is not set
In production, run heroku logs -t | grep RailsAutoscale, and you should see something like this:
[RailsAutoscale] Reporter starting, will report every 15 seconds
If you don't see either of these, try running bundle again and restarting your Rails application.
You can see more detailed (debug) logging by setting RAILS_AUTOSCALE_DEBUG on your Heroku app:
heroku config:add RAILS_AUTOSCALE_DEBUG=true
See more in the logging section below.
Reach out to help@railsautoscale.com if you run into any other problems.
The Rails logger is used by default. If you wish to use a different logger you can set it on the configuration object:
# config/initializers/rails_autoscale_agent.rb
RailsAutoscaleAgent::Config.instance.logger = MyLogger.newDebug logs are silenced by default because Rails apps default to a DEBUG log level in production, and this gem has very chatty debug logs. If you want to see the debug logs, set RAILS_AUTOSCALE_DEBUG on your Heroku app:
heroku config:add RAILS_AUTOSCALE_DEBUG=true
If you find the gem too chatty even without this, you can quiet it down further:
# config/initializers/rails_autoscale_agent.rb
RailsAutoscaleAgent::Config.instance.quiet = trueAfter checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.
To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, commit it, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.
Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/adamlogic/rails_autoscale_agent.
The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.