arkgil
Hello everyone!
Erlang Performance Lab is a tool for developers working with the BEAM, which aims to help with analysis of performance and behaviour of their systems.
Our goal is to provide a tool which will allow folks to see and understand what’s happening inside their systems at first few glances. That’s why we focus on visualising system’s behaviour rather than displaying raw debug information, which may be more detailed, but much harder to comprehend. We strive to make EPL useful for experienced developers, as well as people just getting into the BEAM world. Please note that it’s not meant to be a production-ready monitoring solution, but rather a debugging tool used in your day-to-day development.
Currently our three main “views” are:
- general node info, memory usage and processes count
- visualisation of applications’ supervision trees
- visualisation of network traffic between nodes in a cluster, and visualisation of message passing inside a single node
And a little teaser:
Usage
EPL is portable, meaning you only need Erlang installed on your machine. Then download our prebuilt escript and you’re good to go. You can find download link on our website. To see what it’s all about, follow examples in the README.
Contributing
EPL is completely open-source, and we’d very much appreciate any kind of contributions, be it general usability feedback, finding bugs (
), or developing new views and extending existing ones!
We’re announcing it here today, because just 2 hours ago we merged a pull request, which allows development of backend plugins in Elixir!
Resources
- Michal Slaski’s talk on Erlang Performance Lab from EEF 2017 (Youtube)
- Github repository
- Website
- You can follow our Twitter account
If you have any questions regarding EPL, our vision, roadmap, favourite color, don’t hesitate to ask here or post an issue on Github. 
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OvermindDL1
Ooo this looks fascinating! Thanks for the post!
arkgil
I’m glad you like it
Have fun and break it!
AstonJ
Looks great
aseigo
I used this in a recent presentation on Elixir to show the clustering features in action … the eye-candy really grabbed people, and I’ll continue to monitor the project as it matures to provide further tools. Thanks to everyone who is working on this!
Another interesting tool in this category that i found (and have also used in presentations
is GitHub - koudelka/visualixir: A process/message visualizer for BEAM nodes.💪👁 · GitHub
arkgil
Great to hear that you’ve already found it useful!
We’re currently working on polishing existing views. Next on the roadmap are:
jeramyRR
Is EPL in coordination with Vizceral (Netflix), or is this something separate?
OvermindDL1
From: erlangpl/README.md at master · erlanglab/erlangpl · GitHub
I’m on a not at all low-end desktop (new, ‘high’-end work developer desktop, 4 cores, hyper-threading, 8gigs of ram, not as good as my home desktop but eh) and its been building for over 15 minutes now… The dots just keep spinning and spinning and spinning…
Join me in the forever-spinning… ^.^
But wow, that is a bit of a nasty build time on the front-end, maybe cache it in the github repo instead, or use a language that does not take forever to compile (*cough*elm*cough*)?
arkgil
Yes, we’re using Vizceral for cluster and message passing views.
arkgil
That’s, wow, pretty long. Did you consider downloading our prebuilt escript? Or do you really want to compile it manually?
Actually, we have complete setup for writing frontend code with Elm, so extending EPL with Elm is not a problem.
OvermindDL1
I was just following the instructions from top-to-bottom on the readme in the “Getting Started” section. It is still on that same screen as the animation, coming up on 30 minutes now (it took a few minutes to grab the animation and sync it). I cloned it into another directory too and tried the same thing, its doing the same thing.
I’m not seeing instructions for curl’ing or mix installing the escript on the README.md, is it listed somewhere else?