New Relic Delivers Free Rails Performance Tool

New Relic, maker of application performance management software for Ruby on Rails environments, has announced a new free version of its performance monitoring solution, as well as new features to its enterprise version.

New Relic announced Rails Performance Management Lite, a free, supported performance monitoring product that helps developers and application managers optimize production Rails applications. Developers who use RPM Lite can troubleshoot problems fast by seeing how their applications perform, in production and in real time. The free performance monitoring service is now available to anyone for unlimited use on as many applications or hosts as they need, company officials said.

RPM Lite monitors controller actions; ActiveRecord and database utilization; CPU and physical memory utilization; and slowest pages with drill-downs into page response time and slowest components. In addition, RPM Lite features a real-time dashboard displaying the performance and availability of all a user's Rails applications at a glance; weekly e-mail reports; Apple iPhone access for monitoring on the go; and no limit to the number of hosts or applications a user can monitor, or to the number of users in an account.

“Being without New Relic RPM was like being stuck in a traffic jam, with frustrating lane changes that led nowhere,” said Ryan Boyce, CEO of iOffer.com. “Using RPM is like speeding through the carpool lane. It’s fast and simple, and enables us to fine-tune our application for much better performance.”

Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic, in a statement, said: "The wide adoption of any application development platform demands an ecosystem of high-quality tools and vendors. With a free RPM Lite subscription, Rails developers can now deploy and maintain apps of all sizes, building in performance and scalability from the start. As Rails development and operations teams see their applications grow, they have the opportunity to upgrade to our other subscription-based offerings.”

RPM Lite is available for free for unlimited monitoring in both production and development. Cirne said installation and setup take less than 5 minutes.  Developers can sign up to get RPM Lite for free here.

Upgrading from RPM Lite to a paid subscription provides additional features such as Transaction Tracing, Automated Incident Detection, Error Tracking and Scalability Analysis.  These are the new features New Relic announced for the standard enterprise version of RPM. The new features are available as part of the Bronze, Silver and Gold subscription levels for RPM.