Notes

Using new Relic's Free Server Monitoring

Why New Relic?



Due to some random circumstances at work (and off the cuff), I haven't used New Relic for a while (3 years). Recently, I had a look and noticed that their Server monitoring tier was segregated from their other offerings, including APM, Insights, Mobile, Browser and others.



It's not exactly how I remember it, but maybe the difference was in the marketing/communications. In any case, the best aspect is that the Monitoring of servers is free!



While in terms of your web application, you'll get the best value from New Relic with their paid services, I've found their free Server Monitoring to be an instant life saver, especially when monitoring many (70or more) servers.



The free monitoring of servers is an entry point to make it easier for your part to buy into paid products Of course. It remains to be seen whether this will be free.



We make use of AWS to host paid hosting and customer trials at work. We have one server per application instance since the main application is hosted on-premise and not the multi-tenant database structure. This means that we have a lot of running servers!



We've set up Cloudwatch with SNS for notifications and alarms but it's still difficult to use Cloudwatch to get a clear overview of all the servers. To see what information we could uncover we decided to try New Relic on a small subset of servers.



We were delighted to do so.



Install



The server monitoring daemon installation is extremely simple, particularly because they provide instructions specific to your OS on a silver-plated plate when you add a new server to their web console.



For Debian/Ubuntu servers, these instructions are as follows (only slightly modified for servers running without user root):



These instructions will give you your license key. Don't blindly copy and paste the license key above ?.



Configure



Technically, you don't have to change anything else. However, I like to change one thing. MINECRAFT The server's name, as shown in New Relic will match the host name of the server, which you can find by running the command hostname.



This may not be the way you prefer to identify it, so you can either wait for the server to show up in New Relic, or configure the hostname in advance in the New Relic configuration installed on your server. I chose the latter option.



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



After making any changes, start (or restart) the newrelic-sysmond services:



If you don't take any further steps, you'll soon notice the server in your New Relic account under Server section.



What We Watch



While the New Relic monitoring isn't very sophisticated, it does come with some very nice features.



Processes and their numbers.



PHP is running a bit out of control. That's one issue we were alerted to. The server's CPU usage has surpassed the default threshold of 15 minutes.



We immediately killed off a few PHP processes that were in a state of zombie mode. We saw immediately a reduction in CPU back to normal levels.



We can see a more detailed view of each process type as well, sorting by memory and cpu usage:



Disk Usage



New Relic also sent us alerts regarding the use of disks. One server was stuffed with files that were taking up a lot of space. We were able reduce the amount of disk space used by manually deleting the extra media files, giving us time to allocate more hard drive space.


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