Notes

Using new Relic's Free Server Monitoring

Why is there a new Relic?



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



This isn't how I remembered it, but perhaps the difference was in the area of marketing and messaging. The best part about the Server monitoring tieris that it's free!



While in terms of your web application, you'll get the most value from New Relic with their paid offerings, I've found the free Server monitoring to be a lifesaver especially when monitoring multiple (70+) servers.



The free server monitoring tier can be used as a way to assist you in deciding whether or not you want to purchase paid products. It is yet to be determined if this will remain free.



We utilize 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 code/database structure. This means that we have a lot of running servers!



Cloudwatch has been configured with SNS for alarms and notifications however it's still difficult to use Cloudwatch to see all the servers. We decided to try out New Relic on a subset of the servers to see what insights we could uncover.



We were thrilled to do so.



Install



Installing the server monitoring daemon is simple, especially because they give you specific instructions for your OS on a silver platter when you choose to add the server in their web console.



These instructions are for Ubuntu and Debian 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 the license number above ?.



Configure



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



This may not be the way you want to identify it So you could wait for the server to appear in New Relic, or configure the hostname in advance in the New Relic configuration installed on your server. I chose the second 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 system:



With no effort You'll soon see the server in your New Relic account under Server section.



What We Watch



This monitoring on New Relic isn't super advanced however, it has some really nice features:



Processes and process count.



Note that PHP is a little out of hand - that was one thing that we were alerted about because the server is experiencing a high CPU usage over their default threshold of 15 minutes.



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



We can get a more detailed overview of each type of process as well, sorting it by memory and cpu usage:



Disk Usage



New Relic also provided us with alerts regarding the usage of disks. One server was stuffed with files taking up a lot of space. We were able reduce the amount of disk space used by manually deleting any extra media files, which gave us the opportunity to add more space on the hard drive.


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