timer.clj

(defn find-timer [timer-name]
  (timers/timer ["APPNAME" "timer" (name timer-name)]))

(defmacro with-timer [timer-name & body]
  `(let [timer# (find-timer ~timer-name)]
     (timers/time! timer#
                  (do ~@body))))

On our diversion onto metrics last night, we forgot to circle back to look at the timer. Here's slightly modified version: https://gist.github.com/orb/d207...­

This basically wraps a named timer which (through code not shown here) creates a timer metric and queues it to be sent to Riemann. There's nothing magical here except the point I was making about being able to nREPL to the server. If we are trying to live-debug a performance issue, I can connect to the server and wrap the code I'm interested in a with-timer. We'll immediately get live metrics into Riemann and then into elastic search for those pretty charts I showed in kibana. When we're done, I can remove the with-timer.

I find this brilliant. It doesn't require making a lot of toggle-able metrics in advance. It doesn't require any tooling fancier than nREPL. And, it doesn't require any server downtime.

Awesome