New Relic is looking to capitalize on the growing number of Ruby on Rails application deployments, having recently raised $3.5M from Benchmark Capital for their Rails Performance Management (RPM) product.
RPM is a combination of installed software and cloud services that helps developers understand performance problems in their RoR applications. A Rails developer first installs a standard plugin that continuously sends performance data to New Relic’s servers. He or she can then use an RPM dashboard to identify the specific points in their code that are causing bottlenecks.
Several brand name Rails developers are already using a beta version of the RPM service, including Rails core developer Rick Olson. While the company is reluctant to disclose its current enterprise-size clients, they are obviously going after the several billion-dollar-plus businesses already using Rails in production.
New Relic was founded by Lewis Cirne, who in 1998 started a company that offered similar monitoring software for the then-young Java application industry. Cirne successfully sold that company and has brought several of his old colleagues with him to this new Rails venture.
Other startups working to make Rails deployment less painful include Heroku, which offers online development and one-click cloud deployment, and Engine Yard, which offers managed Rails service infrastructure.
