Smart development teams from companies like SoundCloud, Nike eCommerce, Zendesk, Atlassian, and IGN use New Relic for application performance monitoring—and their platform is now pluggable.
Plugins are great news because application monitoring is a live-or-die capability. When adding new components to the stack, these teams must keep the apps running for their 180 million monthly users, 25,000 collaborating companies, and over $340 million in yearly e-commerce transactions.
We are excited to partner with New Relic to further simplify how these complex web applications are monitored and managed in dynamic cloud environments. To that end, we are joining in a much larger partner eco-system that includes over 45 new plugins for the hottest web technologies out there including the likes of Amazon Web Services, MySQL and Hadoop. Pivotal joins these partners and the respective open source communities to announce new plugins for RabbitMQ and Web Server that works with New Relic’s pluggable architecture.
Editor’s NOTE: The Pivotal team would like to specifically thank Jacob Gyllenstierna of Linden Labs for all his efforts in developing the RabbitMQ plugin. Gyllenstierna completed the initial development and worked with the Pivotal team to finalize testing and acceptance of the plugin.
New Relic Plugins for Pivotal RabbitMQ and Web Server
Pivotal is contributing an open source plugin to monitor RabbitMQ within New Relic. For applications like Instagram, Huffpost Live, Socialvane, Superfeedr, and Indeed.com, building a scalable architecture means deploying a message broker like RabbitMQ, and now these RabbitMQ customers and many others can push data into a comprehensive view of the entire architecture. You will be able to see the traces and transactions for RabbitMQ message servers right alongside other app servers, databases, caches, networking, clouds services, and other elements of your architecture. Troubleshooting any component that produces or consumes RabbitMQ messages (via AMQP or otherwise) is going to get faster and easier with this plugin.
The plugin for Pivotal Web Server will help anyone who needs to monitor Pivotal’s version of the Apache HTTP server. The New Relic plugin will make load balancing or HTTP performance and uptime more visible.
How to Get Your Hands on the New Pivotal Plugins for New Relic
We chose to implement Pivotal plugins via the Ruby SDK provided by New Relic. In order to simplify the installation process of Pivotal-based New Relic plugins, we developed a very lightweight agent to run the plugins instead of maintaining multiple plugins. Users can also configure the plugins in one place and have a single agent to run multiple plugins.
We provide a tarball of the pivotal new relic agent in our github repo.
Here are the steps to install:
1. Create a directory that will contain the Pivotal Plugins for New Relic.
2. Download the latest ZIP of the Pivotal Agent for New Relic from the tags section of https://github.com/gopivotal/newrelic_pivotal_agent and extract the contents into the directory you just created.
3. In the config directory, make a copy of the template_newrelic_plugin.yml file and name it newrelic_plugin.yml
4. Edit config/newrelic_plugin.yml and replace the string "YOUR_LICENSE_KEY_HERE" with your New Relic license key.
5a. For RabbitMQ: In the same config/newrelic_plugin.yml file, set the rabbitmq:management_api_url property to your RabbitMQ management URL. The default value is http://guest:guest@localhost:55672, which assumes that RabbitMQ is running on the same computer on which you are installing the Pivotal Plugins for New Relic, you are using the default port (55672), and you connect using the default guest RabbitMQ user. If your RabbitMQ management URL is different, update the property accordingly.
5b. For VFWS/mod_Bmx: In the same config/newrelic_plugin.yml file, set the configuration properties for your servers. The template contains example of multiple servers to be monitored.
6. From the top-level directory, run the following commands:
$ bundle install
$ ./pivotal_agent
7. After a brief period, the Pivotal Plugins will appear in your New Relic Dashboard under the Plugins tab on the left. Click into it, and then click your server name—you should see charts with data. Here is an example:
