Reporting Metrics to New Relic

New Relic is a well know and widely spread Application Performance Management provider that, among other platforms, supports monitoring applications running on the JVM. Although New Relic has it’s own instrumentation agent that introduces their proprietary tracing and metrics code, we found many of our users wanting to send their metrics data to New Relic, so we delivered :).

This is not an official New Relic product, and is not endorsed by New Relic.

Installation

Add the kamon-newrelic dependency to your project and ensure that it is in your classpath at runtime, that’s it. Kamon’s module loader will detect that the New Relic module is in the classpath and automatically start it.

Configuration

There are two main items that you need to configure to get up and running: Your application name, set via the kamon.newrelic.app-name configuration setting and your New Relic license via the kamon.newrelic.license-key configuration setting.

Integration Notes

This module will only report a small subset of the of the available metrics, namely:

• Web Transaction Metrics: That are generated by using all the traces that are measured from your application.
• External Services: Generated by using all segments that have the http-client category.
• Apdex: Currently a single Apdex value is being reported as an aggregate of traces in your application. You can use the kamon.newrelic.apdexT configuration setting to change the Apdex-T value, which defaults to one second.
• Custom Metrics: All single-intrument entities are reported as custome metrics to New Relic. Please keep in mind that you will need a New Relic paid subscription to see custom metrics for your application.

Visualization and Fun

New Relic has a set of predefined dashboards with fixed metric categories on them that will allow you to see the metrics reported by the kamon-newrelic module without you having to do anything on the New Relic side. Here are a few screenshots of how your traces and segments will look like in the New Relic dashboards:

Licensing

New Relic has its own, separate licensing.