FiveRuns Dash: Really Flexible Analytics

We just installed Dash on BackupMyMail. Dash is a new product from FiveRuns that collects data from your Rails app and presents it in a form that Google Analytics users should be familiar with - charts, mainly.

Dash is great. The way it works is that you create simple "recipes" which monitor your rails app in real time. Setup is really easy, and the output is understandable by non-coders. You can track any sort of data that is important. It could be technical data (such as memory usage and performace information), or business data (such as signups or payments).

As an example of what you can do with Dash, I'll show a simple, but very helpful piece of data that we collected from BackupMyMail. We wanted to be able to tell when someone signed up, or when they tried to sign up, but failed. Within minutes, we cranked out the following chart, which is visible from our Dash dashboard (the data in this chart is not real - it's just for testing):

The yellow line is signups. The red line is failed signups. As you can see, when we tested our signup page with bad info, we got a red spike. I can just sit back and watch this chart and it will tell me when someone fails at the signup process. If I see a problem, I can go check the logs to get more info. When they implement auto-refresh, a series of these charts will go up on a monitor all day long.

Granted, this is something that could be accomplished with a custom admin section. The value that Dash provides is the painless implementation, which saves your developers a lot of time and headaches. Dash also presents the data so well that it's much easier to track lots of these types of issues at the same time, which saves the business guys a lot of time and headaches. Everyone wins - visibility into your app increases without having to pay a high cost in development time.

I've only scratched the surface of what Dash can do. I highly recommend checking it out.