Notes

Using New Relic's Free Server Monitoring

Why a New Relic



Because of random circumstances at work (and the side), New Relic wasn't something I used in a long time (3 years). Recently I took another look and found that their Server monitoring tier was separated from their other offerings - APM, Insights, Mobile, Browser and others.



This is not the way I remember it. Perhaps the distinction was in marketing/messaging. The best part is that the Server monitoring Tier is completely free!



While in terms of your web application, you'll get the most value out of New Relic with their paid offerings, I've found the free Server monitoring to still be an instant life saver, especially when monitoring many (70+) servers.



The free server monitoring tier is a lead-in to make it easier on your to decide to buy into the paid products, of course. It remains to see if that tier will be available.



We run customer trials and pay hosting through AWS at work. Since the main application is an on-premise application (and not the typical multi-tenant code/database structure), we have a server per application instance. That makes for a lot of running servers!



Cloudwatch has SNS alarms and notifications. However, it's difficult to use Cloudwatch to have a complete overview of all servers. We decided to test New Relic with a subset on the servers to see if we could gain any insights.



We were delighted to do so.
Gaming


Install



The server monitoring daemon installation is very simple, especially because they give you OS-specific instructions on a silver plate when you add a new server to their web console.



These instructions are for Debian/Ubuntu servers (only slightly modified for those who don't run as user root).



These instructions will provide you with your license key. Don't just copy and paste it blindly.



Configure



You technically don't need any more configuration, but I do like to change one more thing. The New Relic server name will match the server host name. You can find it by running the command hostname.



This might not be the way that you want to identify the server. Therefore, you can either wait until the server appears in New Relic or you can configure the hostname before the server is available in the New Relic configuration. I choose the latter approach.



Edit the /etc/newrelic/nrsysmond.cfg file and change the hostname section to whatever is appropriate for your server.



After making any modifications, restart (or start) the newrelicsysmond services:



Without further effort, you'll soon notice the server in your New Relic account under Server section.



What We Watch



This monitoring on New Relic doesn't have a lot of advanced features, but it does have some really great features.



Processes and their count.



PHP is a little out-of-control. We were alerted because the server was using a lot more CPU than their default threshold, which is 15 minutes.



We found some zombie PHP processes, which we killed off quickly. We immediately saw a reduction in CPU usage to normal levels.



We can view each process type in more detail by sorting according to memory and cpu usage.



Disk Usage



New Relic also gave us alerts about disk usage. One server had excess files taking up a lot of space. We were able reduce the disk space used by manually deleting media files. This gave us more time to provision more hard drives.


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