New Relic opens its public platform to monitor all your performance data

http://newrelic.com/platform

by jpadilla_ • 13 years ago

70 37 13 years ago

newrelic.com

coopr11• 13 years ago

This has been my main project for months - I'd love to hear what the HN community thinks.

mey• 13 years ago

Is there pricing information available yet? I only see pricing for web app/mobile app.

jmondo• 13 years ago

it's all free!

jpadilla_• 13 years ago

Can New Relic-Heroku users use plugins or is it limited only to New Relic only users?

coopr11• 13 years ago

Yes!

kawsper3• 13 years ago

Why didn't you go with statsd or graphite? You would have gotten a lot of bindings with that.

coopr11• 13 years ago

Try a New Relic plugin and you'll find out why ;)

The experience of adding monitoring with a New Relic plugin should be MUCH better than with any other monitoring approach.

lmirosevic• 13 years ago

Can I ask you why use graphite over SaaS based monitoring like scout, etc.? I'm genuinely curious. Is it just because it's free?

cagenut• 13 years ago

netscaler support please!

coopr11• 13 years ago

You'd like to see NetScaler monitored by a New Relic plugin? Great - build it! If NetScaler makes it easy to get out metrics (SNMP?) then writing a plugin might take only a day or less.

gkop• 13 years ago

Boy am I glad I didn't sign an expensive contract with New Relic recently.

pathy2• 13 years ago

Why is that?

I don't see how expanding their service offering is a bad thing? Surely that expensive contract would have yielded more value than before, given that you use any of the supported applications. If not, you would not be worse of than before?

727374• 13 years ago

Funny. Signing a big contract with New Relic is one of the best things my company has done in the last few years. With very little work, our application monitoring got about 100 times better. Worth every penny.

guywithabike• 13 years ago

They call it an "open platform". I don't get it -- what part of their platform is open? The plugins are open source, but that's not their platform.

josegonzalez• 13 years ago

The part where you can send arbitrary data to them is the part of the platform that is "open".

mattkirman• 13 years ago

Not had much luck with the two plugins I've tried to install so far:

1. The Nginx plugin has a broken init.d script. Not the end of the world, but hardly a plug and play solution.

2. The Varnish plugin download is behind a self-signed SSL certificate (which is for a different domain no less). Furthermore the Gems it requires are loaded from a GitHub repository that is no longer available to the public. There simply doesn't seem to be a way to get this plugin installed.

The install process and software requirements for the plugins also appear to be wildly different. It would be incredible if New Relic provided the ability to install plugins over the command line from a central repository - something as basic as `newrelic install $plugin_name` would be ideal.

I really hope that these issues are worked out as I think this platform has real potential. It's just unfortunate that the quality of the plugins appears to be far from production ready.

silentdragon• 13 years ago

I just got around to installing both of those plugins. I hacked up their provided init script to work with Debian standards. You can see the issue on github: https://github.com/MeetMe/newrelic-plugin-agent/issues/7

As for the varnish plugin I had to edit the gemfile to have

  gem "newrelic_plugin", :git => "git://github.com/newrelic-platform/newrelic_plugin.git", :tag => 'release/0.2.11'

It would be fantastic if it eventually got as simple as their PHP plugin or regular monitoring is to install.

coopr11• 13 years ago

I agree - we (New Relic) have left the install process up to the plugin authors. Hence, plugin installation effort varies widely ; )

In the future you are likely to see some improved installation options, however because you can truly monitor _anything_ with New Relic plugins (at least, for now, anything that emits or can be made to emit time-series numerical data) it is unrealistic to expect that there will be only one, consistent install experience for everything.

In other words, installing the plugin agent to monitor your MongoDB will probably always be different from installing the plugin agent to monitor your John Deere tractor.

vailripper• 13 years ago

Curious how this compares to https://scoutapp.com/

The big disadvantage I see is that I still need to manually install these plugins on each server, whereas with scount my understanding is it's 1 click installs?

itsderek23• 13 years ago

Scout Founder (Derek) here.

Here's my (biased) quick take on the differences between New Relic and Scout plugins:

* It looks like New Relic supports 2 types of plugins (1) direct integrations w/other SaaS services and (2) plugins you place directly on your servers. With Scout, you typically don't need to touch your servers to add plugins, but we don't support direct integrations w/other services (the actual plugins are run on your servers). So, if you're monitoring something server-side (like MySQL), Scout will feel easier. If you're pulling in data from another service (like MongoHQ), New Relic will feel easier.

* New Relic supports Java and Ruby plugins, we just support Ruby.

As a whole, Scout is more of a leaner approach to monitoring than New Relic.

Plugins are a part of most monitoring products. It's really the experience that matters. I love well-maintained tools that just work, so our approach to a plugin system reflects that:

* Gardening - Our plugin repo (https://github.com/scoutapp/scout-plugins) has 1000+ commits from 45 authors. We work hard to make sure plugins work, even when they weren't originally created by us. All of our plugins are open-source, so anyone can submit a pull request.

* One language (Ruby) - Why do we only support Ruby? (1) It's an easy scripting language to grasp (2) we know Ruby very well, so when something breaks, we can fix it 95% of the time vs. having to wait for the plugin author to address it. If you've ever browsed through plugins in an open source system like Nagios or Munin, you'll see how disjointed things can get.

A real-world example:

We track plugin errors in Scout so we can look for trends and plugins w/issues. Today, a customer reported an issue with our Delayed Job plugin via our UI. Beside it, we captured the actual error. They told us their workaround fix, which we then incorporated:

https://github.com/scoutapp/scout-plugins/commit/02239c8785f...

...and added a help entry in case other users run into the same problem:

https://scoutapp.com/plugin_urls/281-delayed-job/help_entrie...

So the total time from the reported issue to the fix was just a couple of hours, which is neato.

miketheman• 13 years ago

It's a step in the right direction - integrating a variety of information sources has always been a key component of our product, Datadog. http://www.datadog.com

It's very important to bring the relevant numbers together to get a cohesive view of the current state, as well as be able to correlate between sources to paint the bigger picture.

thelarry• 13 years ago

Looks pretty cool. While you are building stuff, can you add in dynamic alerts so that I can create alerts around events I care about?

coopr11• 13 years ago

You can add alerts on summary metrics - and you can have up to five summary metrics on a plugin.

If you are consuming a published plugin, you get alerts on whatever summary metrics the plugin author selected. If you are authoring a plugin, you can pick up to five metrics to be your summary metrics, then you can create alert thresholds on those metrics.

vyrotek• 13 years ago

Does anyone use it with Azure? I tried the trial over a year ago and I felt that the new Azure Management Portal did a fine enough job already. Is there something new here now?

I also found this: http://newrelic.com/azure

coopr11• 13 years ago

New Relic monitors your application code execution and your end user's experiences. New Relic Plugins monitor anything - other parts of your application stack that our "stock" agents don't monitor, parts of your business process, whatever.

Azure's Management Portal monitors your infrastructure. New Relic also does a little infrastructure monitoring.

Overall, they do different things - and, New Relic is both free to use and super-easy to install, so perhaps you can try it out and see what you think?

timjahn2• 13 years ago

I see they have a SendGrid plugin. I'm looking to track our SendGrid email traffic more in a more granular manner and for longer than native SendGrid supports (they only store for a few days).

Does SendGrid via New Relic mean they provide more granular tracking and longer term storage?

coopr11• 13 years ago

Longer term - yes: See data retention details here http://newrelic.com/pricing2 (and note that you can get a free New Relic Standard account here http://newrelic.com/sendgrid

More granular - no: The SendGrid plugin presents roughly the same data you could access via the SendGrid API (at least AFAIK).

timjahn2• 13 years ago

Awesome, thanks for the info. How long is the free Standard account free for?

New Relic opens its public platform to monitor all your performance data

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