Tech Blog

After a complete rewrite, Bart and I are proud to present request-log-analyzer version 1.0! Request-log-analyzer is an open-source command-line tool to analyze production log files from your Rails application to produce a performance report.

What’s new?

• More robust log parser. It parses more lines and it now combines all lines that belong to the same request, which greatly improves the amount of information available. 
• It produces more detailed and more beautiful reports. 
• A database builder is included, which will create an SQLite 3 database with all parsed request information, so you can roll your own queries.
• Request filtering options, so you can exclude irrelevant data. An example on how this can be applied in practice can be found in the wiki. 
• Better, more modularized design under the hood. The parser is now fully log file format-agnostic. Developing extensions and modifications, or adding support for other log file formats should be much easier now. See the development-page for some pointers.
• Documentation in the project’s wiki. Hopefully, this helps people get up to speed with the new version and answers most questions about using the tool. If you still have questions, please contact us so we can keep improving it!

Installation

Install or upgrade to the new version with the following command:

$ sudo gem install wvanbergen-request-log-analyzer 
                --source http://gems.github.com

To get the best results out of request-log-analyzer, it is important to configure logging correctly for your application. Some pointers on how to set things up correctly can be found in the wiki.

Since I announced rails-log-analyzer some weeks ago, quite a lot has happened! Apparently there is some interest in such a tool: on this blog we get a lot of traffic looking for more info, the github project already has 22 watchers and it even has been forked!

In the mean time, Bart and I worked hard to add new functionality and refactored the internal design. As a result, I have released request-log-analyzer 0.1.0 today!

Changes: 

• The project is renamed to request-log-analyzer, because we plan to support log files from other frameworks as well; Merb is planned to be supported in the near future.
• The tool is distributed as a gem, making it much easier to install and update.
• More reports, colorized output, parsing progress bars, command line arguments, etc…
• Added a tool to create a SQLite database with all the parsed info from the log file, so you can do your own analysis.

Installation:

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
sudo gem install wvanbergen-request-log-analyzer

Usage:

request-log-analyzer  [LOG FILES*]
request-log-analyzer -c 20 -z log/production.log

Please let me know what you think! If you have any problems using the tool, do not hesitate to contact me!