New Heroku Dashboard and Metrics now in Beta | Hacker News Reader

New Heroku Dashboard and Metrics now in Beta

blog.heroku.com

61 pointsmchiang28 comments

Hey all. I'm one of the designer/engineers responsible for the new metrics tab.

I wasn't part of the selection process regarding Ember, which is the framework powering the entirety of dashboard-next. My personal feelings towards it are pretty ambivalent; as a python guy, I find it tastes a lot like ruby/rails (lots of magic). That being said, Heroku is a growing org, and a lot of people were involved in building out the new Dashboard — the strong conventions of Ember do make it easier for large teams to work together without multiple styles creeping into your codebase.

There's still a lot we'd like to do with Heroku Metrics, but we had to draw the line somewhere and ship a v1 that fulfilled a value proposition. Enjoy it, do (please!) give us feedback, and we'll iterate our way to yet more visibility into your app's behavior.

Nice work. Are the metrics collected using lumbermill?

https://github.com/heroku/lumbermill

Yes! I hope we'll have a engineering blog post covering our metrics pipeline soon.

Out of curiosity are they using ember-cli? (which has even stronger conventions)

Thanks!

Sorry/surprised to see the Metrics feature is enabled only for applications with more than one running dyno.

My biggest question remains "When should I enable a 2nd dyno for my app?" Even better, I'd like to say to Heroku "when this app is overwhelmed, enabled at most X dyno(s), and turn them off as activity decreases".

It's kind of strange that Angular seems to have more developer mind share but then when startups are choosing something beyond Backbone, they seem to go with Ember (e.g. this dashboard, Twitch, Vine, Square). I myself prefer Ember but it's still strange.

As a front-end engineer it's safe to say one should learn both.

Both have good features and "bad" features?

No framework is perfect.I'd say angularjs is to ember what springmvc is to rails.

Having used Angular, Ember, Spring and Rails, I'd say that's a bit unfair. Spring and Java are significantly more verbose than Rails. I wouldn't say Angular is more verbose than Ember to the same extent (it is, but not the same order of magnitude as the Spring/Rails comparison).

Why do you prefer Ember? For me the killer feature of angular is ability to build custom element (directives). Backbone + React is a good competition, but what about Ember?

Ember has components which are very similar.

I use ember full time now but I have done projects in angular. IMHO the directives were by far the cruftiest part of the experience, they had their own structure which didn't really fit with the rest of the framework. This in part because of the lack of a strong object model to leverage. I saw the same problem with knockout.js (although the bindings help matters a little). To date ember is the only framework I've used where it didn't feel like there was something fundamental missing.

Ember has components, simpler alternatives to angular's IMO complex directives. That's just personal taste though.

That, and the router is amazing. Plus there's an actual focus on data, as opposed to angular's free for all

Pretty cool! How do I add a favorite app so that it shows up in favorites? Or is that not functional yet?

You should be able to click the 'star' icon on the far right of an app.

Hover over your app, on the right hand side you should see the "Add to favorites" star.

Any way I can see a preview without getting a heroku account?

Yes, it's in the blog post here:

https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/8/5/new-dashboard-and-...

Thanks. We changed the url to that (from https://dashboard-next.heroku.com) because it's more explanatory.

I'd love to see some full-size screenshots if anyone wants to share.

Much, much better than the previous version!

Interesting that they have their own metrics now. Before they encouraged new relic.

this seems to be a visualization of data already present in the logs (behind some labs addon IIRC), but while useful it's a far cry from what new relic does (i.e. insights into _what_ is taking time and why, not just how much/when).

The Metrics displayed in the new Dashboard focus on the characteristics of app execution on Heroku, rather than internal instrumentation of the application. Hopefully that's useful in providing more visibility into tuning applications on the platform.

If they acquired New Relic and integrated it into the Heroku Dashboard it would give them another edge over normal hosting, but doubt that will happen. New Relic seems to do fine be themself.

New Relic is a bigger business now* (*speculating). And it used to be integrated into the dashboard before the add-on marketplace existed.

Heroku is owned by Salesforce so I doubt that. Interesting to know it used to integrate directly into Heroku before the addons though, didnt know that.

Awesome! Congrats Heroku team!

It's like, slightly better than it used to be. But let me take this opportunity to evangelize for Ninefold. http://ninefold.com

Ninefold is, from my experience, everything you'd ever want from Heroku and much more (which in turn means much less). Far more simple UI and implementation, and extremely passionate and responsive dev team.

Please try out Ninefold if you've ever said "fuck you Heroku" like I have so many times.

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