Roundtrip is a business process tracking and measurement service especially useful for tracking distributed systems and services.

For a simple and useful explanation, check out this blog post before you start.

I recently watched and recommend watching Ruby Monitoring State of the Union by @josephruscio, and felt Roundtrip handles one of the cases he mentioned to be not simple to cover (cross service/process metrics). A very interesting watch regardless.

With it, you can answer these questions, in real-time:

• How is each part of my processing pipeline performing? How is the entire pipeline performing?
• What out of my running transactions didn't end? isn't ending within X amount of time?

You have a couple of options of running Roundtrip.

Roundtrip comes with easy heroku integration.

$ git clone git://github.com/jondot/roundtrip.git
$ cd roundtrip
$ bundle install
$ heroku create

Now configure Redis and Statsd through config.ru (with Heroku, you can give the free-tier RedisToGo a try).

Next, push to your new Heroku app.

$ git add -f Gemfile.lock
$ git commit -am "this becomes a dedicated web project now"
$ git push heroku master

Roundtrip currently supports HTTP as its RPC mechanism (CLI and 0mq are on the way). This means you can host it using your favorite battle-tested Ruby stack -- anything that can run a Rack application.

$ git clone git://github.com/jondot/roundtrip.git
$ cd roundtrip
$ bundle

Now feel free to edit config.ru for Redis and Statsd configuration.

$ bundle exec rackup

You can install the roundtrip gem, and then use the web interface within your existing Rack applications (for example, in Rails, you can mount it).

$ gem install roundtrip

require 'roundtrip'
# set up the default Redis and Statsd components
Roundtrip.options[:redis] = { :host  => 'localhost' }
Roundtrip.options[:statsd] = { :host => 'localhost', :port => 8125 }

require 'roundtrip/web'
# now mount/run Roundtrip::Web

I'll use curl just for illustration purposes. You should use what ever HTTP library you feel comfertable with, within your code.

For usage examples on various platforms check out /examples.

Supply your own ID

curl -XPOST -d id=id-xyz&route=invoicing http://localhost:9292/trips
{"id":"id-xyz","route":"invoicing","started_at":"2012-11-30T18:23:23.814014+02:00"}

Or let roundtrip generate one for you

curl -XPOST -d route=invoicing http://localhost:9292/trips
{"id":"cf1999e8bfbd37963b1f92c527a8748e","route":"invoicing","started_at":"2012-11-30T18:23:23.814014+02:00"}

Using the generated ID, lets add checkpoints:

curl -XPATCH -dcheckpoint=generated.pdf http://localhost:9292/trips/cf1999e8bfbd37963b1f92c527a8748e
{"ok":true}

curl -XPATCH -dcheckpoint=emailed.customer http://localhost:9292/trips/cf1999e8bfbd37963b1f92c527a8748e
{"ok":true}

Let's finish this off, don't forget to do something with the JSON you get back.

curl -XDELETE http://localhost:9292/trips/cf1999e8bfbd37963b1f92c527a8748e
{"id":"cf1999e8bfbd37963b1f92c527a8748e","route":"invoicing","started_at":"2012-11-30T18:54:20.098477+02:00","checkpoints":[["generated.pdf","2012-11-30T19:08:26.138140+02:00"],
["emailed.customer","2012-11-30T19:12:41.332270+02:00"]]}

Fork, implement, add tests, pull request, get my everlasting thanks and a respectable place here :).

Copyright (c) 2012 Dotan Nahum @jondot. See MIT-LICENSE for further details.