Commit graph

7 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Douwe Maan
b7d8df503c Enable Style/MutableConstant 2017-02-23 09:31:56 -06:00
Yorick Peterse
355c341fe7 Stop tracking call stacks for instrumented views
Where a vew is called from doesn't matter as much. We already know what
action they belong to and this is more than enough information. By
removing the file/line number from the list of tags we should also be
able to reduce the number of series stored in InfluxDB.
2016-01-12 15:41:22 +01:00
Yorick Peterse
7ed3a5a240 Revert "Store SQL/view timings in milliseconds"
This reverts commit 7549102bb7.

Apparently I was wrong about
ActiveSupport::Notifications::Event#duration returning the duration in
seconds, instead it returns it in milliseconds already.
2016-01-07 11:47:06 +01:00
Yorick Peterse
7549102bb7 Store SQL/view timings in milliseconds
Transaction timings are also already stored in milliseconds, this keeps
things consistent.
2016-01-06 16:37:14 +01:00
Yorick Peterse
66a997a914 Track total query/view timings in transactions 2016-01-04 12:14:36 +01:00
Yorick Peterse
9f95ff0d90 Track location information as tags
This allows the information to be displayed when using certain functions
(e.g. top()) as well as making it easier to aggregate on a per file
basis.
2015-12-17 17:25:48 +01:00
Yorick Peterse
141e946c3d Storing of application metrics in InfluxDB
This adds the ability to write application metrics (e.g. SQL timings) to
InfluxDB. These metrics can in turn be visualized using Grafana, or
really anything else that can read from InfluxDB. These metrics can be
used to track application performance over time, between different Ruby
versions, different GitLab versions, etc.

== Transaction Metrics

Currently the following is tracked on a per transaction basis (a
transaction is a Rails request or a single Sidekiq job):

* Timings per query along with the raw (obfuscated) SQL and information
  about what file the query originated from.
* Timings per view along with the path of the view and information about
  what file triggered the rendering process.
* The duration of a request itself along with the controller/worker
  class and method name.
* The duration of any instrumented method calls (more below).

== Sampled Metrics

Certain metrics can't be directly associated with a transaction. For
example, a process' total memory usage is unrelated to any running
transactions. While a transaction can result in the memory usage going
up there's no accurate way to determine what transaction is to blame,
this becomes especially problematic in multi-threaded environments.

To solve this problem there's a separate thread that takes samples at a
fixed interval. This thread (using the class Gitlab::Metrics::Sampler)
currently tracks the following:

* The process' total memory usage.
* The number of file descriptors opened by the process.
* The amount of Ruby objects (using ObjectSpace.count_objects).
* GC statistics such as timings, heap slots, etc.

The default/current interval is 15 seconds, any smaller interval might
put too much pressure on InfluxDB (especially when running dozens of
processes).

== Method Instrumentation

While currently not yet used methods can be instrumented to track how
long they take to run. Unlike the likes of New Relic this doesn't
require modifying the source code (e.g. including modules), it all
happens from the outside. For example, to track `User.by_login` we'd add
the following code somewhere in an initializer:

    Gitlab::Metrics::Instrumentation.
      instrument_method(User, :by_login)

to instead instrument an instance method:

    Gitlab::Metrics::Instrumentation.
      instrument_instance_method(User, :save)

Instrumentation for either all public model methods or a few crucial
ones will be added in the near future, I simply haven't gotten to doing
so just yet.

== Configuration

By default metrics are disabled. This means users don't have to bother
setting anything up if they don't want to. Metrics can be enabled by
editing one's gitlab.yml configuration file (see
config/gitlab.yml.example for example settings).

== Writing Data To InfluxDB

Because InfluxDB is still a fairly young product I expect the worse.
Data loss, unexpected reboots, the database not responding, you name it.
Because of this data is _not_ written to InfluxDB directly, instead it's
queued and processed by Sidekiq. This ensures that users won't notice
anything when InfluxDB is giving trouble.

The metrics worker can be started in a standalone manner as following:

    bundle exec sidekiq -q metrics

The corresponding class is called MetricsWorker.
2015-12-17 17:25:48 +01:00