Redline — Simplified Redis Performance Management

Written by Luke Driscoll, Sakura Akiyama-Bowden, Elvin Yuen, Alan Perng

What is Redline?

Redline is an open-source tool that displays vital metrics for Redis instances. It is easy to set up, free to use, and alerts developers to performance issues, so that they can avoid constantly monitoring their application’s Redis instances. Redline takes the guesswork out of an application’s performance efficacy and makes it easy to identify potential problems or areas of improvement.

Why monitor your application’s Redis metrics?

Any application utilizing a Redis cache will be directly affected by the health of that instance. The ability to visualize key performance metrics can provide valuable insight into the performance of the Redis server and allows developers to both improve the efficiency of their application’s Redis queries and quickly diagnose any performance issues that might arise.

Redline monitors:

• Used memory
• Key space hits and misses
• Instantaneous ops per second
• Commands processed
• Connected clients
• Evicted and expired keys
• and many more

All of these traits can have an impact on your application’s overall health. By keeping an eye on core metrics, developers gain visibility into system performance in order to make better decisions.

Redline Features

• Customizable Metrics: Customize which metrics you want to have displayed in real-time.
• Alerts: Set up alerts for individual metrics to be notified when a metric dips below or exceeds a specified value.
• Login: Use your Google or GitHub login to quickly and securely access Redline and save your Redis instances.
• Easy Set Up: Simply enter your Redis instance host, port, and password, give it a nickname, and click to connect.
• Free: Redline removes the financial barrier to entry, making it accessible to all developers.

How do you use Redline for applications in production?

Navigate to Redline and set up a user account, or click straight through to our monitoring tool. Users who opt to sign up using Auth0 are able to save their Redis instances.

Go to your Redis cloud console and copy your host, port and password from your configuration settings. Your port can be found after the colon in your endpoint.

Add your Redis instance’s host, port, and password in the sidebar, and give it a unique nickname before you add it to your collection. Click on the nickname to display your metrics.

Redline will spin up the graphs for the performance metrics associated with the selected cache, and you can interact with our dynamic graphs to choose which metrics you would like to monitor.

Click the alert icon at the bottom of the chart you’d like to monitor, and enter the threshold value that will trigger the alert.

How do you use Redline for applications in development?

There are two ways to use the application for development purposes. The first method:

1. First, clone the repository from Github .
2. Run docker build -t redline . in your terminal
3. Run docker run -p 3001:3000 redline in your terminal
4. Navigate to localhost:3001. You should see the web application and enter your host, port, password (default is empty) and nickname.

Or, simply pull the image from Docker:

1. Navigate to Docker Hub and pull the image using the command docker pull sakurakiyama/redline
2. Run docker run -p 3001:3000 sakurakiyama/redline in your terminal
3. Navigate to localhost:3001. You should see the web application and enter your host, port, password (default is empty) and nickname.

If you’re having any trouble, please refer to the images in the section above.

Conclusion

We at Redline built this tool because we love the lightning-speed of Redis caches and wanted to further enhance our ability to optimize them. If you would like to view or contribute to this tool, please feel free to check out our website or GitHub repo or connect with any of us in the team below!

Connect with Redline:

Luke Driscoll | GitHub and LinkedIn
Software Engineer based in Boston

Alan Perng | GitHub and LinkedIn
Software Engineer based in San Diego

Elvin Yuen | GitHub and LinkedIn
Software Engineer based in New York

Sakura Akiyama-Bowden | GitHub and LinkedIn
Software Engineer based in New York