Integrating AppSignal in Ruby

It's possible that AppSignal does not provide automatic integration for your framework of choice, or maybe you're using your own application setup.

See our list of supported integrations to see what frameworks and gems we support with the AppSignal gem.

When AppSignal does not support something using the gem it's still possible to to instrument applications. AppSignal needs to be configured and started once at the beginning of a process. It can be configured through a configuration file or by using environment variables.

Configuration

Environment variables

When using environment variables to configure AppSignal the gem will read the configuration from the environment once it starts. It's as easy as calling Appsignal.start at the beginning of a process.

require "appsignal"
Appsignal.start

Configuration file

When using a configuration file to configure AppSignal, the configuration needs to be initialized beforehand to tell the gem where to look for its configuration.

require "appsignal"
Appsignal.config = Appsignal::Config.new(
  current_path,
  "production"
)
Appsignal.start

AppSignal will look in the path of the first argument for a config/ directory containing an appsignal.yml file to load the configuration. The second argument is the environment it will load from the configuration file.

Monitoring transactions

After setting up the configuration and starting AppSignal, AppSignal is ready to monitor the process.

# in a controller
Appsignal.monitor_transaction(
  "perform_job.processor",
  :class       => "EmailWorker",
  :method      => "perform",
  :metadata    => {},
  :params      => {},
  :queue_start => Time.now
) do
  yield
end

If the first argument starts with perform_job the transaction will be recognized as a background job, if it starts with process_action it will be recognized as an HTTP request.

Before your process exits it's necessary to call Appsignal.stop to make sure that all the instrumentation data gets flushed to the AppSignal system agent and doesn't get lost.

If your process always runs one job and immediately exits afterward you can use the Appsignal.monitor_single_transaction helper instead. This will ensure that AppSignal stops automatically.

Appsignal.monitor_single_transaction(
  "perform_job.ping",
  :class       => "HourlyPing",
  :method      => "perform",
  :queue_start => Time.now
) do
  yield
end

Example app

We have an example application in our examples repository on GitHub. The example shows how to set up AppSignal with a simple Ruby application.