X Ray Machine

Ever wanted to log and profile your external API calls in a Rails app the same way Rails does with active record? Look no further, as the x-ray-machine is the thing that will enable you to do that!

As per usual add this to your Gemfile

gem 'x-ray-machine'

Then just call XRay.whatevers with some marker you wanna see in the logs (it can be an url or anything stringy) and then give it a block to measure.

class MyThing
  def talk_to_elastic_search
    url = figure_the_url

    XRay.elastic_search url do
      make_the_actual_request url
    end
  end

  def talk_to_twitter_api
    XRay.twitter "loading recent tweets" do
      load_some_tweets_for_fun_and_profit
    end
  end

  def craaaazy_stuff
    XRay.baaacooon "fat acids hitting the brain" do
      i_wonder_if_spacemen_eat_bacon
    end
  end
end

This will show something like this in your rails console

ElasticSearch (5.1ms)  /url?bla=bla&bla
Twitter (100.2ms) loading recent tweets
Baaacooon (10.1ms) fat acids hitting the brain

In case you want to mark a query as cached, you can use the ray object that is passed down the block, and mark it as cached

url = "some/url.thing"

XRay.heavy_request url do |ray|
  if result = find_in_cache(url)
    ray.cached = true
  else
    result = make_the_actual_request(url)
  end
end

After that your log entry will look like so

HeavyRequest CACHE (0.1ms)  /url?bla=bla&bla

Normally, the XRay object will use method_missing and automatically guess the name for the entry and use a random color for it, but you can customize things

XRayMachine.config do |config|
  config.elastic_search = {
    color: :yellow,         # color for the line
    title: "ES",            # title for the entries
    show_in_summary: false  # show/hide the results in the summary
  }
end

NOTE: the name you use with the config should match the one that you use on the XRay class to track your queries.

All code in this repository is released under the terms of the MIT License

Copyright (C) 2014 Nikolay Nemshilov