Our application at Yardstick is Rails 2.3.x, and we use some Sinatra based metal controllers. We also use NewRelic to monitor things.

Get Low

Something got updated somewhere, maybe the NewRelic gem, maybe something else. Our Apdex hit 0.3 or something stupid and stayed there.

After a long debugging period going back and forth with the NewRelic folks, we figured it out.

Problem, meet Solution

The way a metal controller in Rails 2.3 works is that the app hits the stack, it works its way through all the metal controllers, then hits the main Rails controller. The metal controllers either handle the request, or returns a 404. When a 404 is encountered, Rails hits the next controller.

The problem was that when Sinatra hits a 404, NewRelic was treating it as an error. This meant the request was considered failed, and marked as being "frustrating". We monkeypatched the NewRelic Sinatra instrumentation to ignore the request when calculating apdex if the request was a 404.

The other problem is that when Sinatra hits that 404, it puts an entry in the Rack environment. We setup the monkeypatch to delete the Sinatra error from the Rack environment, and clear the NewRelic exceptions.

Now our app reports a correct Apdex. Yay!

If you are running Rails 2.3.x, are using Sinatra metal controllers, and are monitoring with NewRelic, you probably want to dump this in an initializer in your app.