libhoney

Ruby gem for sending events to Honeycomb. (For more information, see the documentation and Ruby SDK guide.)

Installation

To install the stable release:

gem install libhoney

or add libhoney to your Gemfile:

gem 'libhoney'
# or, to follow the bleeding edge:
#gem 'libhoney', git: 'https://github.com/honeycombio/libhoney-rb.git'

This gem has some native dependencies, so if you see an error along the lines of "Failed to build gem native extension", you may need to install the Ruby development headers and a C++ compiler. e.g. on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby-dev

Note that libhoney requires Ruby 2.2 or greater.

Documentation

An API reference is available at http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/libhoney

Example Usage

Honeycomb can calculate all sorts of statistics, so send the values you care about and let us crunch the averages, percentiles, lower/upper bounds, cardinality -- whatever you want -- for you.

require 'libhoney'

# Create a client instance
honeycomb = Libhoney::Client.new(
  # Use an environment variable to set your write key with something like
  #   `:writekey => ENV["HONEYCOMB_WRITEKEY"]`
  :writekey =>  "YOUR_WRITE_KEY",
  :dataset => "honeycomb-ruby-example"
)

honeycomb.send_now({
  duration_ms: 153.12,
  method: "get",
  hostname: "appserver15",
  payload_length: 27
})

# Call close to flush any pending calls to Honeycomb
honeycomb.close

Check out the documentation for Libhoney::Client for more detailed API documentation.

You can find a more complete example demonstrating usage in example/fact.rb

Debugging instrumentation

If you've instrumented your code to send events to Honeycomb, you may want to verify that you're sending the events you expected at the right time with the desired fields. To support this use case, libhoney provides a LogClient that outputs events to standard error, which you can swap in for the usual Client. Example usage:

honeycomb = Libhoney::LogClient.new

my_app = MyApp.new(..., honeycomb, ...)
my_app.do_stuff
# should output events to standard error

Note that this will disable sending events to Honeycomb, so you'll want to revert this change once you've verified that the events are coming through appropriately.

Testing instrumented code

Once you've instrumented your code to send events to Honeycomb, you may want to consider writing tests that verify your code is producing the events you expect, annotating them with the right information, etc. That way, if your code changes and breaks the instrumentation, you'll find out straight away, instead of at 3am when you need that data available for debugging!

To support this use case, libhoney provides a TestClient which you can swap in for the usual Client. Example usage:

fakehoney = Libhoney::TestClient.new

my_app = MyApp.new(..., fakehoney, ...)
my_app.do_stuff

expect(fakehoney.events.size).to eq 3

first_event = fakehoney.events[0]
expect(first_event.data['hovercraft_contents']).to eq 'Eels'

For more detail see the docs for TestClient and Event.

Contributions

Features, bug fixes and other changes to libhoney are gladly accepted. Please open issues or a pull request with your change. Remember to add your name to the CONTRIBUTORS file!

All contributions will be released under the Apache License 2.0.

Releasing a new version

Travis will automatically upload tagged releases to Rubygems. To release a new version, run

bump patch --tag   # Or bump minor --tag, etc.
git push --follow-tags

bensheldon/libhoney-rb