New Relic Service Monitoring Plugin

This plugin is meant to monitor any background services running on your server.

Requirements

• (New Relic)[https://newrelic.com] account
• Ruby 1.8.7 or higher
• Ruby Gems
• make
• On ubuntu, you'll also need to install ruby-dev package to build the json gem used by NewRelic SDK.

Packages required on Ubuntu

• ruby
• ruby-dev
• make

Installation

• Create the GEM (see Building the GEM below)
• gem install newrelic_service_monitor_plugin-1.0.2.gem
• cd $(dirname $(gem which newrelic_service_monitor_plugin))/../config/
• cp template_newrelic_plugin.yml newrelic_plugin.yml
• edit newrelic_plugin.yml to match your configuration (see below)

Configuration

In the config\newrelic_plugin.yml:

• replace YOUR_LICENSE_KEY_HERE with your New Relic License Key
• under agents -> service_monitor fill in:
  • name - this will be a name that you'll see in New Relic, usually the host's name
  • processes - list of key -> value elements where key is the name to be shown in New Relic, value is the command to be executed to check the status. Status of the process is determined by this command: returning exit code 0 shows process as running, returning anything else shows process as not running.

Example configuration

agents:
    service_monitor:
        name: 'Testing'
        processes:
            nexus: "service nexus status"
            php-fpm: "service php-fpm status"

Running

For production use (if you installed the gem), use the daemon (should be in your $PATH): newrelic_service_monitor_plugin.daemon start

Daemon supports standard commands: start, stop, restart, status. It also monitors the plugin and restarts it if needed.

That's it! Go to NewRelic -> Plugins and you should see your instance reporting data in a couple of minutes.

Reported values

Status of each process will be reported to New Relic using NRPE-compatible values:

• 0 - ok
• 1 - warning (not used)
• 2 - error (checked process not running)

The metrics in New Relic will be called Compoments/{process name}/Running[]. Use "Average value" when analyzing the metrics. You'll probably need to adjust the default dashboard showing the statistics to show information about your process.

Development

Development requirements

• Rubygems 1.8 or higher
• Bundler 1.3.0 or higher

Development installation

• run bundle install
• copy config\template_newrelic_plugin.yml to config\newrelic_plugin.yml
• fill in your configuration as described below

Building the GEM

• Modify the spec.version in newrelic_service_monitor_plugin.gemspec
• gem build newrelic_service_monitor_plugin.gemspec