Notes

Using new Relic's Free Server Monitoring

Why is New Relic important?



Due to a variety of circumstances at work (and on the side) I haven't used New Relic in quite some time (~3 years). I recently looked into their Server monitoring tier, and discovered that it was not part of their other offerings, like APM, Insights Mobile, Browser, and others.



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


When it comes to your web application, you'll get most value from New Relic with their paid services, I've found their free Server monitoring to still be a lifesaver especially when monitoring multiple (70or more) servers.



The free monitoring of servers is an introduction to make it easier for your part to buy into the paid products, of course. The decision on whether or not to keep it free is yet to be determined!



We run trials for customers and pay-per-hosting through AWS. We have one server for each instance, as the main application runs on-premise and not the multi-tenant database structure. That's a lot of running servers!



Cloudwatch has been set up with SNS to send notifications and alarms, but it's still difficult to use Cloudwatch to see all the servers. To see what information we could discover we decided to try New Relic on a small portion of servers.



We were thrilled that we had done it.



Install



The server monitoring daemon installation is easy, particularly because they provide OS-specific instructions on a silver plate each time you add a new server to their web console.



These instructions are for Ubuntu and Debian servers (only slightly modified for those who do not run as user root).



These instructions will provide you with your license key. Do not blindly copy and paste the license key.



Configure



Technically, you don't have to change anything else. However, I like to alter one thing. The New Relic server name will be identical to the host name of the server. You can find it by running the command hostname.



This might not be the best method to determine it. You can either wait for New Relic to show the server or configure the hostname ahead of time in the New Relic configuration on your server. I prefer 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, restart (or restart) the newrelic-sysmond services:



You'll soon notice that server appear in your New Relic account under the Server section, with no further work on your part.



What We Watch



While the New Relic monitoring isn't very modern, it does include some really nice features.



Processes and process count.



PHP is running a bit out of control. That's one that we were notified about. The server's CPU usage has exceeded their default threshold of 15 minutes.



We discovered a few zombie PHP processes, which we killed quickly. We saw immediately a reduction in CPU back to normal levels.



We can see an even more comprehensive overview of each type of process as well, sorting by the amount of memory and CPU usage:



Disk Usage



New Relic also provided us with alerts about disk usage. One server had excess files taking up a lot of space. We were able to decrease the disk spaced used by manually deleting extra media files, which gave us time to provision more space on the hard drive.


My Website: https://risks.info/