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Rails Pulse

Self-hosted performance monitoring for Rails apps

Rails Pulse is a Rails engine that monitors your app's performance from the inside. It tracks slow requests, N+1 queries, SQL performance, background jobs, and unhandled exceptions. All data stays in your own database, no third-party cloud, no SaaS subscription, no data leaving your servers.

Installation

Add to your Gemfile:

gem 'rails_pulse'

Run the installer:

bundle install
rails generate rails_pulse:install
rails db:migrate

Mount the dashboard in config/routes.rb:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  mount RailsPulse::Engine => "/rails_pulse"
end

Schedule the background jobs:

RailsPulse::SummaryJob.perform_later  # cron: 5 * * * *
RailsPulse::CleanupJob.perform_later  # cron: 0 1 * * *

Your dashboard is now at http://localhost:3000/rails_pulse.

Upgrading

From 0.3.3:

bundle update rails_pulse
rails generate rails_pulse:upgrade
rails db:migrate                  # or: rails db:migrate:rails_pulse
rails rails_pulse:migrate_routes  # required — fills Action and merges same-action paths

Restart all processes after migrate. This release changes how routes are stored (method moves off the route onto each request), so mixed old/new processes are not supported.

The upgrade generator appends new settings to config/initializers/rails_pulse.rb without rewriting what you already set. Review with git diff and keep or discard hunks.

Exception tracking is off for existing installs. The generator inserts config.track_exceptions = false; set it to true after migrating to opt in:

config.track_exceptions = true
config.capture_exception_params = true  # params are filtered via Rails' filter_parameters

Separate-database hosts: set schema_dump: false on the rails_pulse entry in config/database.yml and delete db/rails_pulse_structure.sql if that file exists.

If you previously added rails-pulse.js / rails-pulse.css to config.assets.precompile, remove those entries — the gem no longer registers dashboard assets with Sprockets (that re-minify OOMs small hosts). Production deploys that use config.asset_host or a CDN-only CSP should run assets:precompile so rails_pulse:install_assets copies digested files into public/assets.

Full install guide: railspulse.com/documentation/installation

Separate database setup: railspulse.com/documentation/database

Configuration

Rails Pulse works out of the box with sensible defaults. To customise, edit config/initializers/rails_pulse.rb:

RailsPulse.configure do |config|
  config.enabled = true

  config.request_thresholds = {
    slow: 700,
    very_slow: 2000,
    critical: 4000
  }

  config.track_jobs = true
  config.capture_job_arguments = false  # keep false to protect sensitive data

  config.track_exceptions = true
  config.capture_exception_params = true  # params are filtered via Rails' filter_parameters

  config.full_retention_period = 30.days
end

Full configuration reference: railspulse.com/documentation/advanced

Authentication

Rails Pulse has no built-in authentication, you protect the dashboard using your app's existing auth. Add an authentication_method to the initializer:

RailsPulse.configure do |config|
  config.authentication_enabled = true
  config.authentication_redirect_path = "/login"

  config.authentication_method = proc {
    unless user_signed_in? && current_user.admin?
      redirect_to main_app.root_path, alert: "Access denied"
    end
  }
end

Authentication guide: railspulse.com/documentation/authentication

Features

• Request monitoring — every request is timed and stored with its route, status, SQL count, and duration. Slow requests are flagged automatically based on thresholds you control.
• Query analysis — captures the queries behind each request, detects N+1 patterns, and tracks normalized SQL across requests so you can see which queries are hurting you in production, not just in development.
• Job tracking — monitors background job duration, queue wait time, and failure rates. Works with any Active Job adapter.
• Exception tracking — captures unhandled exceptions from web requests and background jobs, groups them by class and location, and shows full backtraces with filtered request params. See recurring errors in production without a separate error monitoring service.
• System health bar — at-a-glance dashboard summary showing healthy, slow, and critical counts across your routes, queries, jobs, and storage. Lets you see the overall state of your app before drilling into specifics.
• No data leaves your app — everything is stored in your own database. No third-party cloud, no SaaS subscription, no outbound connections.
• Low overhead — tracking is async and uses a thread-local flag to skip recording Rails Pulse's own internal requests.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.

License

Available as open source under the MIT License.