If you’re looking for some new Ruby and Rails toys to tinker with, you might be interested in Dash, a new metrics service. Here’s some excerpts from the original article.

Dash, a new metrics service from FiveRuns, has been moved to private beta (for which you can apply) allowing interested developers to take part in assessing a new way to monitor your applications. The new service from FiveRuns is an extensible monitoring service for gathering metrics from your critical daemons and applications.

What Dash does is collect metrics from you apps using a framework or language that is plugin specific. These plugins then collect the metrics which they send to FiveRuns for presentation on you app dashboard. The information from your metrics is then presented through line charts and sparklines collected in several reports, which in turn show your metrics based on preset periods of time.