Application Performance Monitoring with New Relic

New Relic One is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform used for monitoring web, mobile applications, API calls, and infrastructure in real-time. We can monitor metrics, logs, events, and transactions through pre-built and custom dashboards and create alert policies. New Relic provides real-time alerts and anomaly detection so that the DevOps engineering team can ensure the smooth running of application and infrastructure.

Here we will be monitoring a Java Application running in a docker container. For that first, we need to create an account on New Relic One. After that follow these steps:

Step1:  Login to your New Relic account.

• Click On Add Data in the top right corner.

• Select your application language.

• Click on Begin Installation.

• Select On a host->Other Java Installation Options.

• Give a name to your application and download the configuration file.

Step2:  Connect to the host in which your application is running.

• Create the following directories.

mkdir newrelic
mkdir logs

• Download the New Relic Java Agent.

curl -O https://download.newrelic.com/newrelic/java-agent/newrelic-agent/current/newrelic-java.zip

• Unzip and copy the files to the newrelic directory that we just created.

unzip newrelic-java.zip

• Replace the newrelic.yml file with the custom config file you downloaded.
• The startup script or command to start our application must contain Java’s built-in argument          -javaagent. We have to set this argument with JAVA_OPTS variable.  We also have to copy newrelic and logs directory to our container.

docker run -it -d --tmpfs /run --tmpfs /tmp --name travelapp \

-e JAVA_OPTS="-Xms128m -Xmx320m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -javaagent:/usr/local/tomcat/newrelic/newrelic.jar" \

-v ~/newrelic:/usr/local/tomcat/newrelic \

-v ~/logs:/usr/local/tomcat/logs \

-p 8081:8080  chkmt/travel:latest

• To monitor host infrastructure, copy this command

docker run \
-d \
--name newrelic-infra \
--network=host \
--cap-add=SYS_PTRACE \
--privileged \
--pid=host \
-v "/:/host:ro" \
-v "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock" \
-e NRIA_LICENSE_KEY="Enter your license key here" \
newrelic/infrastructure:latest

Step3: See your data.

• Click on See your data.

• If the connection was successful you will see the option to Explore your data, now click on it.

• Next, you will see a dashboard like this. You can see on the left side different parameters that you can monitor like Distributed Tracing, Databases, Transactions, JVM, etc.

• To monitor host infrastructure click on Explorer->Infrastructure->Hosts.
• Select your host.
• You can now see metrics like CPU usage, free memory, etc.

• You can also monitor logs from New Relic. Go to Logs.

Author Details

This blog is written by M/S checkmate global technologies cloud engineering team, Please write to them for seamless cloud infrastructure migration, infrastructure monitoring platform deployment.