Rackspace Cloud customers get free Cloudability monitoring for all of their Rackspace spend, as well as up to $2,500 of cost monitoring for non-Rackspace accounts. In the screencast below, I walk you through how to quickly setup Cloudability for your cloud configuration.

Cloudability can automatically email you daily reports of your cloud spending across a multitude of cloud services, and Cloudability has an easy way to view your historic server spends at a quick glance. The tool can give you an estimate for the month and compare it to previous spend. You are also able to breakdown the costs by cloud account and vendor. You can also set up a monthly budget, where you can automatically receive an email if you get near, or exceed, your server budget.

Cost monitoring is very important in this day and age, and with the advanced tools that Cloudability offers, you’ll be able to clearly understand and monitor your cloud spending.

I have personally used Airbrake to monitor some applications that I previously built at a startup, so you can imagine that I was really excited when Exceptional Cloud Services, the team behind Airbrake, recently became part of the Rackspace family. You can get started with Airbrake by going to www.airbrake.io to learn more information about its plans and pricing (note: there is a free developer plan). I have included a screencast below that walks you through a step-by-step guide on installing Airbrake to your Rails app.

Getting started with Rails? Find out how Bret taught himself the framework.

After you get Airbrake set up, there are several features that I have found helpful:

1. You can set up Demo, Staging and Production environments, which can help you monitor errors that a specific version of your application is throwing as well as make sure you prioritize issues based on environment. Keep production running smoothly first, then worry about the Dev environment!
2. Clicking on the text of the error message will pull up more information, such as: the stack trace, the user agent and IP addresses of the browsers that triggered it. This information is incredibly powerful at helping you debug your application. You don’t want to spend hours trying to recreate the issue in Chrome if the user is on Firefox.
3. There is also information under “deploy” about when you last deployed the particular release. You can also integrate with GitHub, which can associate an issue with a particular code release and will reset all notices when you push up a new code version.
4. Airbrake does a great job at aggregating similar errors. Instead of giving you a list of the same error repeated over and over, you have the latest date and time when the error occurred as well as a count of the number of times the error happened. This has helped save my email inbox from blowing up when there was repetitive error.

To setup Airbrake in your Rails application, open up your gem file and type:

gem ‘airbrake’

Now go into terminal and type:

bundle install

Once that’s done, go back into your Rails application, and go to your application controller file and make sure that it does not include “exceptionnotifiable” up in the top. It should look something like this:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
     protect_from_forgery
end

Go back into terminal and type:

rails generate airbrake --api-key [your_key_here]

Where [your_key_here] is your API key from Airbrake. This will install Airbrake and throw an example error in the Airbrake portal to verify you did the installation correctly. Logging back into the Airbrake application, you can see the error that was just generated here in your log that reads, “If you can see this, it works.” You now have Airbrake up and running, and can rest a little bit easier knowing that your application is being monitored.

Check out Bret’s previous post where he talks about monitoring the cloud infrastructure that your app is sitting on. Stay tuned for next week where Bret discusses a tool that can help developers monitor the hosting costs of their application.

Head over to the Rackspace DevOps blog for a drill down into using Airbrake on the Rackspace Cloud.

In the screencast below, I show you how to set up a ping check to check the server every 60 seconds to see if it is up and alive. This check will ping your server from three different regions (Dallas/Fort Worth, London and Chicago) and will alert you if the server doesn’t respond.

HTTP checks are a powerful way to check the availability of your infrastructure. Some examples of HTTP checks include verifying that a string of text on a webpage shows up properly, your most popular products can be added to your cart or even that your authentication system is working. In the video, I show you how to set up a monitoring check that looks for specific text in the footer.

For more information on advanced monitoring check out docs.rackspace.com. There you’ll also find SDKs for Python, PHP, Java and Ruby that you can use to set up monitoring or enable your application to create and respond to monitoring events, including spinning up new cloud infrastructure instances when incidents happen.

Check out Bret’s first post where he talks about three things that developers need to monitor. Stay tuned for next week where Bret discusses a tool to help monitor and alert you if your application has any internal errors.

Infrastructure

When monitoring your physical infrastructure, such as servers and load balancers, you want to make sure that they not only have connectivity, but also a snappy response time. At Rackspace, we have a product called Cloud Monitoring that lets you set up a basic ping check to test the connectivity from three different geographic regions. Furthermore, there are some more advanced HTTP checks that can look for a specific block of text on the page or even place a particular item in your shopping cart to make sure that your site is functioning. Knowing that your infrastructure is up and available is key to having a reliable app.

Application

The second thing that developers want to monitor is the actual app itself.  This would help you understand when your app throws an error, such as unexpected data from a user you haven’t accounted for, invalid data from a third party source or even if something in the app just breaks. There are some third party tools that are incredibly helpful to monitor your app’s health. Both Airbrake and New Relic are excellent at monitoring the guts of your application and alerting you when there is an issue.

Cost

The final thing you want to monitor is something that not a lot of devs think about: cost. In a cloud world, it’s easy to lose track of what you are spending. You may have multiple cloud environments where you spin up temporary cloud servers and forget to take them down. Or you could write a script against the cloud API to create servers and it unexpectedly goes haywire, standing up servers you didn’t even need. Or you could simply use different providers and it is hard to aggregate total costs.

To help with this problem, we have a partnership with a company called Cloudability, which lets you monitor your spend from not only Rackspace, but also other cloud service providers. You can set up spend thresholds that give you alerts if your anticipated monthly spend exceeds your monthly budget. This has saved me a lot of money in the past when I inadvertently left up some test servers.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be highlighting detailed screencasts showing how to actually set up these monitoring tools, so be sure to check back.

The clever keystrokes of Emacs fans have written a championship story: Emacs is the Text Editor Madness tournament champion! After four rounds of the tournament, thousands of votes, trash talking, left out contenders and broken hearts, the championship has finally been awarded. Vim/vi and Emacs have been battling for almost 30 years so it was fitting that they meet in the final round for a chance at ultimate victory.

The two editors took very different paths to the championship game, with Vim rolling through its competition at every round, while Emacs had to withstand valiant opposition at each turn. None of that matters once you get to the championship round though, as the motto “Survive and Advance” means the scores reset to 0-0 in every game.

The final game was worthy of its billing as the two long-time archrivals battled back and forth, with both editors taking the lead at some point. Ultimately the passionate fans of Emacs rallied together and willed their editor to victory over Vim.

The flexibility of Emacs allowed it to twist and contort itself through every round, doing what was necessary to survive and win the championship. In the final around against Vim it pushed Vim against the wall and forced it to beep repeatedly until conceding defeat.

Don’t let vim win, vote #emacs rackspace.com/blog/text-edit…

— Greg Onufer (@gonufer) March 22, 2013

Whether your text editor won or lost, thanks for voting in this year’s Text Editor Madness bracket! We are going to keep the bracket up so you can see how the tournament played out as well as our daily recaps. If you are curious about my four favorite text editors, be sure to visit my other post.

Here’s a recap of each round:

Round 1: (1) Emacs over (16) TextPad, (9) TextMate over (8) BBEdit, (4) Sublime Text over (13) Notepad, (5) Kate over (12) UltraEdit, (2) Vim over (15) Crimson Editor, (7) TextWrangler over (10) EditPlus, (3) Notepad++ over (14) Chocolat, (11) Gedit (11) Geany

Round 2: (1) Emacs over (9) TextMate, (4) Sublime Text over (5) Kate, (2) Vim over (7) TextWrangler, (3) Notepad++ over (11) Gedit

Round 3: (1) Emacs over (4) Sublime Text, (2) Vim over (3) Notepad++

Round 4: (1) Emacs over (2) Vim

From March 22, 2013

In the tournament, there’s often no substitute for experience and poise, and both of our finalists have been in the text editing game for a long time. Emacs and Vim, the one and two seeds of the 2013 Text Editor Madness tournament have fought off all competitors and powered into the finals. While Vim handily dispatched Notepad++ in the semis; Emacs and Sublime Text were involved in an instant classic. Sublime Text came into the day with dreams of making it to the championship match, and its last two rounds had given it hope, rolling over Notepad and Kate.

March madness: my favorite editor, Sublime, is up against Emacs for the finals (51-49). It’s going to be close! rackspace.com/blog/text-edit…

— Anant Narayanan (@anantn) March 21, 2013

Sublime Text led Emacs during the morning but soon the passionate Emacs fanbase rallied and the game was tied and then back and forth for most of the day. Emacs dug deep into its reserves and finished strong, closing out Sublime Text and advancing to the finals!

“What text editor do you use?” is a proxy for#areyouagoodperson? Also, good people, vote for your editor here: rackspace.com/blog/text-edit…

— Shane Celis (@shanecelis) March 21, 2013

Now it is the battle of the behemoths. The bluebloods. The titans of text editing. Emacs versus Vim. Who will be crowned champion? Whose dreams will be dashed? It all comes down to this! Tell your friends, tell your kids, tell  your mailman to vote for your favorite editor– in this tournament it only takes one shot to write history.

From March 21, 2013

The second round of Text Editor Madness saw no upsets as all four favorites advanced to the Final Four. The top-seeded Emacs fought off a valiant effort from TextMate to advance, while Vim continued its dominance, rolling over TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software. Gedit, an 11 seed and Cinderella of the tournament, saw midnight strike as it wasn’t able to sustain its momentum from the previous round and got knocked off by three seed Notepad++. Sublime Text lived up to its name with a beautiful performance in ousting five seed Kate.

The popular pick for the finals is between Emacs and Vim, but there is a large contingent of folks, especially on Reddit, who are looking for Sublime Text to make the upset. With Emacs limping into the Final Four and a passionate crowd rooting for Sublime Text, anything can happen. After all, this is March.

Who will win between Emacs and Vim ? goo.gl/rgUWm

— Sylvain Benner (@syl20bnr) March 21, 2013

The choice is yours. We are down to the Final Four, so get your votes in today to help your favorite editor advance to the championship round.

From March 20, 2013

The first day of Text Editor Madness is in the books, and in true tournament fashion there were already two upsets in the first round. The biggest upset of the day was 11 seed gedit running away from six seed Geany. The other upset was in a battle of commercial editors with nine seed TextMate victorious over eight seed BBEdit. At the top of the bracket, No. 1 overall seed Emacs held on despite a valiant effort from TextPad, while two seed Vim crushed Crimson Editor and cruised onto the next round.

The closest matchup of the day was OS X editor TextWrangler  eking out a win over Windows-based EditPlus. NotePad++ dispatched upstart editor Chocolat, and the longtime player Notepad was ousted in the first round by the surging Sublime Text. A common upset is a 12 seed over a 5 seed, but the chalk held this time as Kate ground out a victory over UltraEdit to advance.

No tournament selection is complete without discussion around those that didn’t quite make the cut. Basketball fans know that sometimes deserving teams can get left out of the tournament when the committee releases their final selection, and the Text Editor Madness Tournament was no exception. Social media was abuzz with talks of the text editors that were snubbed. On Google+, folks were clamoring for Nano and TECO. After Racker Major Hayden posted the bracket on Twitter there were calls for Pico from several in the Twitterverse.

@robynbergeron @rackerhacker Srsly.

— Mike Brittain (@mikebrittain) March 19, 2013

From March 19, 2013

This time of year, everyone loves talking about brackets. But instead of college hoops, we want to see which text editor will be crowned champion and get to play “One Shining Moment” as it cuts down the nets.

A field of 16 text editors will compete in this Text Editor Madness tournament. The selection committee looked for text editors that: (1) work on different operating systems, (2) cost money or are open source and (3) span all time periods – some are old, some are new. The top four seeds are editors that are well known and incite passion (Emacs, Vim, Notepad++ and Sublime Text), and we know that there will be a royal rumble as the rounds advance.

The bracket will be updated daily, with the winners advancing, so be sure to come back and vote for your favorites through Friday! Also, check out which text editors made my Final Four.

I’ve been coding for a long time primarily in .NET (though I recently taught myself Ruby on Rails). Consequently, I have used many different text editors throughout the years. For developers, choosing a text editor is like the wizards in Harry Potter choosing a wand at Ollivanders Wand Shop before entering Hogwarts. The text editor will be a special bond between user and the program, the instrument of choice to wield your code magic.

Discussion on text editors can insight a sort of passion and fanaticism among developers in the same way that sports fans debate for their teams in March Madness. If I were to create my own personal Text Editor Tournament, here’s what my Final Four would look like:

Notepad++

Out of the tough Windows conference, Notepad++ has been my go to editor of choice when I’m on a PC. It’s been around since 2003 and supports opening large files and doing regular expression based search and replace, which is a must have for any text editor I use. However, watch out for Extended vs. Regular Expression vs. Normal when doing your replaces, as this can change the search and replace behavior. While not particularly beautiful, it’s responsive and stable, two requirements that I need. Notepad++ also has a wide range of macro libraries and syntax highlighting built in, but you can always add your own syntax and autocomplete files. It has a large and active ecosystem of plugins that adds almost any functionality you want to this flexible editor. Being open source and at a price of free, it’s hard to beat.

Vim

Out of the powerful and historic Linux conference, Vim is my preferred editor when connecting into a remote terminal. It’s completely text based and thus beautiful in its simplicity. No fancy menus, no distracting animations; with Vim, it’s just you and the code. Vim adds syntax highlighting, brace matching and all the other programming goodies modern text editors provide. And it ships with virtually every Linux and Unix distribution, so SSH away and you’ll have access to this lightweight and powerful editor on any server. Since Vim doesn’t really use the mouse, training my fingers to use the keyboard for navigation and commands showed me how quickly you can really be by keeping your fingers on the keyboard and away from the mouse.

Sublime Text

Introduced in 2008, Sublime Text is the new kid on the block. It picked up steam with the release of Sublime Text 2 in 2011. It is cross platform (OS X, Windows, Linux), but seems to be making the most waves in the Mac conference. Unlike most cross platform apps, the UI is not clunky and slow. Much effort has been put into Sublime Text to make the app look great on each platform. Sublime Text is quite speedy and has a skinnable, minimalist elegance that works well and blends in on all operating systems. In a stroke of genius, the creators of Sublime Text added compatibility with TextMate bundles, which immediately gave it a large variety of extremely useful tools and plugs that the Textmate ecosystem had created over the last few years. Since MacroMates took so long to get TextMate 2 released, it opened the door for Sublime Text to come in and create some momentum. This editor also has a vi compatibility feature named Vintage Mode, so you can put all those super-fast keyboard tricks you learned in vi and Vim to good use.

EditPlus

Sometimes you have to stick with your heart instead of your mind. In this case, EditPlus is my emotional choice, as it was the first text editor I enjoyed working in. I would pick it to be the Cinderella story of my tournament, upsetting the big boys to make my Final Four. I still look back fondly on the pale salmon colored background I spent hours tweaking to get just right, and it was the first editor in which I used regular expressions to transform my data on the fly using search and replace. It was fast and had an easy way to add color syntax highlighting. I started using it not long after it was released in 1998 and kept using it long after EditPlus 2 seemingly stopped being updated. EditPlus 3 is now on the scene, but unfortunately I had already moved on to Notepad++. However, this editor will always hold a the special place of being the first one that I started using besides Notepad when I thought, “I don’t want to open up my whole IDE/editing suite, I’ll just quickly edit this in EditPlus.”

So what text editor is your favorite? To correspond with the start of March Madness, we have our own brackets of text editors that you can vote on over the next four days, culminating in the people’s choice for the best text editor out there. Be sure to drop by tomorrow and each day this week to pick your favorites for each round. The bracket will be updated daily with the winners advancing to the next round.

Windows

Windows users are in luck as there is a great, no hassle installer available at RubbyInstaller.org. This is about as easy as it gets for installing Rails; unfortunately, my experience on a Windows laptop (even one with an SSD) is that Rails development can be painfully slow due the large amount of file I/O that Rails development entails.

Mac

This is bound to change, and I had to rewrite some of these instructions over the course of installing Ruby on Rails on a couple of different Macs with different versions of OS X and XCode. But here is what worked for me on Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) and XCode 4.5.2. There are a couple of terms and concepts to be familiar with.

• XCode is Apple’s development environment, primarily used for creating iOS and Mac apps, but it includes some system libraries that you need for our Rails development.
• Homebrew is a package environment for OS X that can install most other missing system packages you’ll need for Rails
• RVM (Ruby Version Manager) is highly recommended as it lets you manage different versions of Ruby, Rails and Gems so you can try out new versions or mimic different production environments without having to install/reinstall everything.

Installing Rails

Install XCode:

• Click and install XCode from the Mac Store
• Once installed, go to Preferences -> Downloads -> Install Command Line Tools

Install Homebrew and apple-gcc42
This installs the Homebrew package manager and a GCC compiler

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"
 $ brew tap homebrew/dupes
 $ brew install apple-gcc42
 $ sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/gcc-4.2 /usr/bin/gcc-4.2

Install RVM:
In the OS X Terminal, issue the following commands:

$ \curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable –ruby

Note: run the source command outputted from the above command

$ rvm install 1.9.3
$ rvm use 1.9.3
$ rvm --default 1.9.3

The above commands install RVM, install ruby version 1.9.3, tell RVM to use the 1.9.3 version for the rest of the stuff you’ll install and set 1.9.3 to be default going forward.

Install XQuartz
Apple no longer ships an X Windowing system starting with Mountain Lion, so you’ll probably need to install the open sourced version of this available at  http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

Install Rails

$ gem install rails

Rails should now be installed. To create a test app, run

$ rails new my_app_name

If you get an error about OpenSSL support, you may need to update RVM. See the instructions at https://rvm.io/packages/openssl

Optional: MySQL
MySQL is a popular open source database that you may want to install locally to make sure that it behaves the same as your production instance of MySQL (if that’s what you’re running). Rails abstracts a lot of the different database differences to your app, but you still may want to actually run MySQL just to have the added confidence that there aren’t any subtle quirks/differences.

$ brew install mysql

 $ unset TMPDIR

 $ mysql_install_db --verbose --user=`whoami` --basedir="$(brew --prefix mysql)" --datadir=/usr/local/var/mysql --tmpdir=/tmp

 $ mysql.server start

 $ /usr/local/opt/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password '[[[YOUR_ROOT_PASSWORD_HERE]]'

If you want to have MySQL start automatically when your Mac logs in, you can set it up like this:

$ mkdir -p ~/Library/LaunchAgents
$ cp /usr/local/Cellar/mysql/5.5.27/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
$ launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist

Optional: ImageMagick

• I had to do some basic image manipulation in my app (resizing photos, etc) and I had to install the ImageMagick package through homebrew to get it working.

$ brew uninstall imagemagick
 $ brew install --fresh imagemagick

Done! I had to try a lot of combinations to get it working on my laptop and my app; hopefully this helps as most of the online resources I found were out of date for Mountain Lion or the newest version of XCode.

There are also more detailed instructions for the Mac, as well as Linux installation instructions available at http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book#sec-rubygems

Happy coding!