Just as useful as a development tool as it is for production debugging
What do you like best?
FR is very polished with tons of data. Automatic JDBC wrapping takes zero setup and nearly every screen or dashboard is customizable. I use FR to debug queries that have run, how long they took, and even to fish out long running requests. I always use it when performance testing, and it has excellent reporting on the most hit pages and DB calls in my app. The profiler is the best tool I’ve never seen to tell me exactly what a request did after it’s done executing by pinpointing the exact lines of code in the stack traces that spent the most time.
What do you dislike?
FR is not free like other tools, but it also offers immensely more features once you get to know it. Now that they offer a cheap developer license, it is much more accessible.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
There is a 2 week trial you can use for free. The simplest installation method is via the commandbox-fusionreactor module for CommandBox CLI.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
I use it for general web development to track the processing of Ajax calls and REST APIs that can’t output debug information easily to the browser. I use it as a companion tool to JMeter when performance testing to track web request and JDBC throughput as well as response times, status codes, and errors. I’ve used it to find production errors, memory leaks, and performance issues as well. It also can notify me of long running requests so I have a heads up immediately if my site has slowed down. FR Cloud also serves as a consolidated place for metrics from my Docker swarm.
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