Skylight, a Ruby profiler, free for open source applications (opens in new tab)

NewRelic is much more comprehensive (they also have a "profiling" feature), but you rarely, if ever, find yourself needing any of the additional features. For the price, it's hard to beat Skylight. Also, we've found pganalyze to be an amazing bang for the buck.

desireco428y ago

That is debatable, insight NewRelic offers is kind of complementary. However at the price that is way, way, more.

sergiotapia8y ago

Absolutely better.

wasd8y ago

Has anyone used New Relic and switched to Skylight or vice versa? Been looking for some comparisons [1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/sunnyrjuneja/status/951973556170215424

snowpalmer8y ago

I could never find anything actionable in NewRelic. Seems like interesting data, but nothing I could optimize for. Skylight has identified slow performing areas where we've worked on and watched a downward trend.

desireco428y ago

Come on, I love Skylight, but really! Slowest queries, slowest requests, breakdown of every hit into details how much time everything took. It gives you too much actionable data if you ask me. You can constantly optimize some slow-pokes, I have to remind myself to not optimize pages that are not most used.

danmaz748y ago

Note to the Skylight marketing team: I had never heard of your service in 10 years of using Rails, even if it was something that could very valuable to me. But if I open the homepage what I see is:

"DO THE ANSWER DANCE". Cool looking weirdo characters dancing. Generic charts-filled dashboard screenshots. Comparatively very small text saying "learn why your app is slow".

If you hadn't been vouched by this HN thread, I would have never read below the fold to learn that you allow profiling Rails apps.

drewda8y ago

I see that the logs and analysis will be open to everyone. I guess that's equivalent to using Travis, CircleCI, etc. on their free/open tiers. But API logs and analysis like Skylight performs can have much more unpredictable and sensitive info in them than test/build logs.

Does this mean that all private fields needs be scrubbed in-app, before Skylight? For example, a hosted OSS service that includes e-mail addresses or location data in API query strings.

wycats8y ago

The short answer is no.

We work differently than other similar products, in that we rely heavily on aggregation, both for presenting useful data in the UI and also to keep our backend scalable. We don't keep around particular aspects of individual requests. Individual requests are essentially only used as "data points" to build statistical models about your app/endpoints. For example, any SQL queries are parsed and sanitized on your server before they are sent to us[1].

That probably sounds more involved than it actually is in practice – you can see it for yourself on the dashboards for The Odin Project[2] and the Homebrew formula browser[3]. The bottom line is that there is no way to get from the aggregated data back to an individual request.

[1] https://www.skylight.io/support/faqs#security

[2] https://oss.skylight.io/app/applications/g0gJSNnzYAws/recent...

[3] https://oss.skylight.io/app/applications/jut3BrkJo722/recent...

drewda8y ago

Good to know. Thanks.

FanaHOVA8y ago

Been using this on production for ~1 year now, no complaints so far!

avtar8y ago

“Skylight is a smart profiler for Ruby on Rails applications.”

wycats8y ago

For clarity, we also support almost all Rack-based frameworks in Ruby (including Sinatra):

https://www.skylight.io/support/advanced-setup

We should probably update our copy to clarify this point in the prominent places where it isn't already clear.

kibwen8y ago

As a further historical note that may interest HN users specifically, Skylight was the world's first production user of Rust (the Ruby gem they ship is written in it), dating back to well before Rust was even stable.

atarian8y ago

Which is mainly because Yehuda Katz (Rust core member) works at Skylight.

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Cyberdog8y ago

Darn, you beat me to it.

Product blog operators, please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16278142

1 more reply

dang8y ago

Ok we've attempted to integrate that into the title.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

32 comments

Dangeranger8y ago

The Rust language community has recently released a case study on Skylight and how Rust has been a competitive advantage for them.[0]

[0] https://www.rust-lang.org/pdfs/Rust-Tilde-Whitepaper.pdf

sergiotapia8y ago

If you're building a Rails app, you should be using Skylight. It gives you:

1. What's slow.

2. What's hit frequently.

This combined gives their "agony" ranking for you to fix problems that impact the most. In a very clean UI!

Terrific product. I wish I had Skylight for my Phoenix/Elixir stack.

artellectual8y ago

https://www.appsignal.com has a great product, and works for Elixir / Phoenix too.

It also supports, profiling background jobs.

napsterbr8y ago

I wish they added freebsd support :(

Edit: wow, looks like they added[0] a few months ago! Awesome

0 - https://docs.appsignal.com/support/operating-systems.html#fr...

sergiotapia8y ago

Yeah we're using AppSignal, I do kind of miss Skylight's "agony" metric though.

steveklabnik8y ago

Funny enough: also Rust production users.

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igravious8y ago

Does it build up a performance profile over time? As in, do you need to serve thousands of requests before you get a picture?

deedubaya8y ago

No. It starts showing results after a few requests.

ksylvest8y ago

Do you find it significantly better than NewRelic?

booleanbetrayal8y ago

desireco428y ago

That is debatable, insight NewRelic offers is kind of complementary. However at the price that is way, way, more.

sergiotapia8y ago

Absolutely better.

wasd8y ago

Has anyone used New Relic and switched to Skylight or vice versa? Been looking for some comparisons [1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/sunnyrjuneja/status/951973556170215424

snowpalmer8y ago

desireco428y ago

danmaz748y ago

Note to the Skylight marketing team: I had never heard of your service in 10 years of using Rails, even if it was something that could very valuable to me. But if I open the homepage what I see is:

"DO THE ANSWER DANCE". Cool looking weirdo characters dancing. Generic charts-filled dashboard screenshots. Comparatively very small text saying "learn why your app is slow".

If you hadn't been vouched by this HN thread, I would have never read below the fold to learn that you allow profiling Rails apps.

drewda8y ago

Does this mean that all private fields needs be scrubbed in-app, before Skylight? For example, a hosted OSS service that includes e-mail addresses or location data in API query strings.

wycats8y ago

The short answer is no.

[1] https://www.skylight.io/support/faqs#security

[2] https://oss.skylight.io/app/applications/g0gJSNnzYAws/recent...

[3] https://oss.skylight.io/app/applications/jut3BrkJo722/recent...

drewda8y ago

Good to know. Thanks.

FanaHOVA8y ago

Been using this on production for ~1 year now, no complaints so far!

avtar8y ago

“Skylight is a smart profiler for Ruby on Rails applications.”

wycats8y ago