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

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

#31

Post by itsderek23 »

vailripper wrote: post #24

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?

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.

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

#32

Post by coopr »

silentdragon wrote: post #21
mattkirman wrote: post #20

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 d…

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 eve…

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.

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

#33

Post by coopr »

thelarry wrote: post #26

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?

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.

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

#34

Post by coopr »

cagenut wrote: post #23
coopr wrote: post #2

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

netscaler support please!

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.

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

itsderek23 wrote: post #31
vailripper wrote: post #24

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?

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 a…

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by coopr »

vyrotek wrote: post #27

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

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?

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

#37

Post by lmirosevic »

kawsper wrote: post #12
coopr wrote: post #2

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

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

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?

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

#38

Post by kawsper »

lmirosevic wrote: post #37
kawsper wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

I haven't used Scout but I have the same problems with that as I do with NewRelic. Their plugins is built for their vendor agent. With that said I do like the opensource plugins of Scout.

The issue is that we are now a lot of people that tries to solve the same kind of problems. Everyone seems to be writing collectors that reports information to backends.

On top of my head I can name:

http://opensource.brightcove.com/project/diamond/ http://collectl.sourceforge.net/ http://collectd.org/

They all implement some kind of RRD or Graphite service hooks. It would be nice if all I should do to upgrade was to point my existing collectd collectors to NewRelic or Scout and be good to go.

Instead, I now have to reconfigure my whole stack, install their agent, add their plugins for my software, make sure things are working and then switch.

I am not advocating that everyone should use Graphite, I am just advocating that we should have some consistency between these systems, so we can use the same collectors no matter what the backend is.

I had a feeling that Graphite+Statsd was where the community was heading given that both Etsy and Github are using that.

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

#39

Post by timjahn »

coopr wrote: post #29
timjahn wrote: post #28

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?

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).

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

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

#40

Post by coopr »

timjahn wrote: post #39
coopr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

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