graphite-newrelic

A Graphite plugin for the New Relic Platform (beta / proof-of-concept)

Get your graphite data displayed in New Relic.

Why?

Because it's there. New Relic has a very nice charting capabilities. (Which is hard to admit, after creating Giraffe). Unfortunately it's not that easy to work with custom/business-data as Graphite/Statsd. The new Plugin options for New Relic make it somehow possible to try to mix those two together.

Usage

• Edit config/newrelic_plugin.yml and replace "YOUR_LICENSE_KEY_HERE" with your New Relic license key
• Edit graphite_agent.rb and replace "_TYPE_YOUR_GUID_HERE_" with a GUID (e.g. com.your-name.plugin.name)
• Update your settings to match your graphite server, authentication (optional)
• Update the targets to match your graphite targets
• run bundle install and then bundle exec ./graphite_agent.rb
• keep your fingers-crossed

Notes / Settings

This is still in the proof-of-concept phase. Just a weekend project at this stage. It seems to work though.

Considering the New Relic plugin architecture, this is more of a Graphite to Newrelic SDK than a plugin. It should at least give you a skeleton for fetching data from Graphite and feeding it into New Relic, where you can build some dashboards to display it.

Only the last datapoint is currently used from graphite. If you are trying to collect counters, this might mean you won't get the data you expect. Use graphite's summary or other aggregation functions, and make sure the last datapoint is correct. I might extent it in future to pick between last/first/average/min/max etc.

The New Relic Ruby SDK does not seem to support any kind of aggregation (total, max, min etc are all the same). see https://github.com/newrelic-platform/newrelic_plugin/blob/master/lib/newrelic_plugin/data_collector.rb#L14

By default this agent will attempt to fetch 2 minutes of data from graphite. You can adjust this using the from parameter in your target.

New Relic limits the number of updates to 1 per minute. The polling interval is also set to 60 seconds by default.

Once you run the agent, it will report data to your new relic account. You will have to set up the dashboard(s) to show the data. The prefix setting in your target can be used to organize data sent to New Relic.

Each target can report different units (e.g. req/s, registration, clicks). Without it, the agent will default to Units.

It's recommended to use the graphite alias, aliasByNode etc - to make the targets look nicer on New Relic.

Contributions

I'd be happy to get some ideas or pull requests and think of ways to improve this.

It might make more sense to create a New Relic plugin that acts as a statsd server. This could fit better within the New Relic plugin model, and would require no Graphite server. However, the New Relic plugin model is based on polling, so I'm not sure how to mix those two together. Using New Relic as a statsd backend might also lose some of the nice capabilities of Graphite to aggregate data in different ways.