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Install App and Server Agents

Terms for this Section

New Relic License Key

This is a 40-character hexadecimal string that New Relic provides when you sign up for your account.

Example Key: a00a403ec153eb64c01a9dc47c1654ccbc3760fa

Agent Configuration File

The New Relic agent reads settings, including license key and application name, from a config file.

New Relic Log Files

The New Relic agent and daemon can be configured to log output about what they are doing.

Application Agent Installation

Install PHP Application Agent

Add the repo


rpm -Uvh http://yum.newrelic.com/pub/newrelic/el5/x86_64/
newrelic-repo-5-3.noarch.rpm

Install the app monitor


yum install newrelic-php5

Run the installer


newrelic-install

New Relic uses an application agent to instrument the code and collect metric data. A large majority of our customers deploy PHP applications, so we’ll be going over installation of this basic application. The process is very similar between Red Hat/Centos and Debian/Ubuntu. For our course we’ll be using the latest version of CentOS. 1. First we need to install the repository so that we can download the application. 2. Once the repo is installed, just use yum install to add the application. In this instance, we’re using the PHP application, but use the same method for other applications. 3. Finally, run the installer. This step will require the assistance of the customer, because their license key will be required. 4. The license key is available within the New Relic Control Panel: http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/accounts-partnerships/accounts/account-setup/license-key#finding 5. If you don’t have the key at the time of installation, or the key changes, you can manually adjust those in the config file New Relic Install Guide: http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/php-agent/getting-started/new-relic-php Managed Ops Install Guide: https://one.rackspace.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=19661928 Questions: 1.

Install PHP Application Agent

New Relic uses an application agent to instrument the code and collect metric data. A large majority of our customers deploy PHP applications, so we’ll be going over installation of this basic application. The process is very similar between Red Hat/CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu. For our course we’ll be using the latest version of CentOS. 1. First we need to install the repository so that we can download the application. 2. Once the repo is installed, just use yum install to add the application. In this instance, we’re using the PHP application, but use the same method for other applications. 3. Finally, run the installer. This step will require the assistance of the customer, because their license key will be required. 4. The license key is available within the New Relic Control Panel: http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/accounts-partnerships/accounts/account-setup/license-key#finding 5. If you don’t have the key at the time of installation, or the key changes, you can manually adjust those in the config file New Relic Install Guide: http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/php-agent/getting-started/new-relic-php Managed Ops Install Guide: https://one.rackspace.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=19661928 New Relic Installation Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPTe7hUiQC4&list=PLmhYj7Jl81JHMoBdrGhUjZF0Y8KCamisc Questions: 1.

Server Agent Installation

Install Server Monitor Agent

Install the server monitor agent


yum install newrelic-sysmond

Run the installation


nrsysmond-config --set license_key=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY

Lab: Let’s Do New Relic

Install New Relic PHP Agent
Install New Relic Server Monitor Agent
Make PHP Do Something


php -r "phpinfo(); sleep(10);"

Observe in RPM

Lab: Solution

Configuration Setting

Terms for this Section

agent configuration

settings within the configuration files installed along with the agent.

server-side configuration

Settings within the New Relic UI that affect agent behavior.

agent vs daemon

The NR PHP Agent consists of two pieces, a PHP extension (“agent”) and a standalone process (“daemon” or “proxy daemon”) which handles transmission of data to New Relic.

apdex & apdex_t

Apdex is a measurement of how well your application is performing. It quantifies aggregate user experience into a number between 0 and 1. Apdex_t is the setting you define which sets the baseline for “expected performance”, and is used to calculate apdex.

Server Side Configuration

Whose server? Not yours, not your customer’s...New Relic’s!

Agent Configuration

Agent configuration is the most extensive and expressive way to change the behavior of the agent. It can change ...

connection type/details (proxy, SSL)
License key and application name
change settings on level of detail gathered & logged

Agent settings generally ship with sane defaults, and self-discovers others, so you shouldn’t need to change anything besides application name in the config file - unless you need to use a proxy to communicate with New Relic’s servers, or some other network setting Depending on your system setup, the agent installer may instrument more than one version or copy of php. For instance, there is typically a command line version of php that has separate configuration from the web version. You can use the phpinfo() call in a script (run from command line and/or web) to determine if the agent is correctly installed - it will show a “newrelic” section with settings below in case it is. This is also a good place to confirm that the settings you intended are in place (eg: license key does not report **INVALID**, application name is what you intend, etc).

Location

The configuration file is most often found at /etc/php5.d/newrelic.ini but could be in other locations as well.

Agent Settings

Agent settings need to be visible to PHP, so they can be set in php.ini or other config files.
NR attempts to install a “ newrelic.ini ” where the machine configuration supports multiple ini files.

Agent settings generally ship with sane defaults, and self-discovers others, so you shouldn’t need to change anything besides application name in the config file - unless you need to use a proxy to communicate with New Relic’s servers, or some other network setting Depending on your system setup, the agent installer may instrument more than one version or copy of php. For instance, there is typically a command line version of php that has separate configuration from the web version. You can use the phpinfo() call in a script (run from command line and/or web) to determine if the agent is correctly installed - it will show a “newrelic” section with settings below in case it is. This is also a good place to confirm that the settings you intended are in place (eg: license key does not report **INVALID**, application name is what you intend, etc).

PHP Agent Settings

List of available PHP agent settings:

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/php-agent/configuration/php-agent-newrelicini-settings

Changing Settings

To make settings changes take effect, you’ll need to restart the agent. This typically involves an app server restart, and for the PHP agent, some settings which apply to the proxy daemon will require its restart as well. Nothing within the following lab will require a proxy daemon restart. the blog posts have the long story about why you’d want to rename the application, but the short story is that you probably have more than one application (two different blogs on the same server), or wish to segment an existing application (separate performance monitoring for the public-facing blog and the administrative interface). once you scale to multiple servers or completely distinct applications, you may be especially interested in having better names than “PHP Application” and renaming is *required* to monitor distinct apps separately (eg a wordpress and a drupal and a magento app will all merge together within your account as “PHP application” if you don’t name them differently). The PHP agent during install now asks you to set an application name (but still maintains that default - “PHP Application”, but no other agent installation does! How: the easiest, universal-to-all-app-agents method to change an app name is change the application name in the config file. the PHP agent is the most easily configured - there are several other ways documented in the “how” linked doc: using the agent API within your app code (see chapter 4 advanced), using vhost configuration in apache/nginx, or using .htaccess style directory config for apache. the pros and cons of various methods are further specified in the article.

Why would you rename the app?

How to Rename the App

The easiest, universal-to-all-app-agents method is change the application name in the config file.

Other ways...

Lab: Server Side Configurtion

Log into your testing account in New Relic
Select the demo application
Navigate to the Settings section, Application section
Change the apdex_t setting
Save
service httpd restart

Lab Solution

...before

after:

Lab: Agent Configuration

Visit your “app” in browser and view-source on the page; observe that there are two lines (header and footer) referencing ‘NREUM’
locate newrelic.ini (on centos 6, typically /etc/php5.d/newrelic.ini)
Using your favorite editor, open that file as root (eg ‘sudo vi /etc/php5.d/newrelic.ini’)

Same lab environment as server side, same instance/account per student. Chose this setting because it is easy to test success or failure, not because turning it off is particularly useful in most cases. Advanced use cases that might need this: 1) you absolutely don’t care about browser performance (you’re an idiot!), 2) you prefer to manually instrument only certain pages (eg: a page that streams html5 video takes as long as the video takes to play to finish loading, so you choose to instrument the other pages on the site only), 3) you prefer to manually instrument all pages on your site in a way that we can’t. blog post describing one possible use case: http://www.aaronpeters.nl/blog/why-loading-third-party-scripts-async-is-not-good-enough typically you’d actually change settings like app/sql trace thresholds, or adding extra method tracers for methods we don’t trace by default (eg, i want to see how long i spend in php’s built-in sleep() - we ignore some builtin functions since we have a limit of 2000 nodes in a transaction trace)

Lab: Agent Configuration cont...

Change the setting ‘newrelic.browser_monitoring.auto_instrument’ to 0
Restart your dispatcher (eg apache)
Visit the web copy of your demo script and observe that the javascript header and footer for auto_instrumentation is missing (search for ‘NREUM’)

Lab Solution

Locate and Troubleshoot Data

Terms for this Section

Transaction trace

By default, New Relic captures details about the slowest transactions, including call stacks and SQL statements.

Error trace

New Relic captures details about unhandled exceptions, including stack traces and error messages.

Transactions Dashboard

Viewing an individual transaction

Viewing transaction traces

Transaction Traces

Using the Server Dashboard

Processes Dashboard

Network Dashboard

Disks Dashboard

Lab: Using Transaction and Server data to troubleshoot performance problems

Visit the permalink provided by your instructor
Using New Relic’s Transaction and Server dashboards, determine whether the application has a performance problem
If so, determine what caused the problem (for example, slow code, slow database queries, limited server resources, etc.)

Lab Solution

Did the application have a performance problem? How did you know?
If so, what caused the problem? What data led you to that conclusion?

Using the Errors Dashboard

Viewing an individual transaction

Apdex

Terms for this Section

Apdex

An industry standard to measure users' satisfaction with the response time of an application or service. It's a simplified Service Level Agreement (SLA) solution that gives application owners better insight into how satisfied users are, in contrast to traditional metrics like average response time, which can be skewed by a few very long responses.

Apdex T

The application owner defines a response time threshold: “T.”

All responses handled in T or less time satisfy the user. For example, if T is 1.2 seconds and a response completes in 0.5 seconds, then the user is satisfied. All responses greater than 1.2 seconds dissatisfy the user.

Apdex Score

The Apdex score is a ratio value of the number of satisfied and tolerating requests to the total requests made. Each satisfied request counts as one request, while each tolerating request counts as half as satisfied request.

Application Performance Index

How to Compute the Apdex Score

Apdex Bucket

Calculating Apdex: Errors

Unhandled Exceptions are always “Frustrating” results

Calculating Apdex

Calculating Apdex: Examples

Configuring Apdex Threshold

Lab: Fun with Apdex

Calculate Apdex Example
Log into New Relic
Review existing Apdex score
Make changes to Apdex-T
Refresh site to see how Apdex Score responds

Link to Apdex calculator: http://bit.do/apdex

Calculate the Following Apdex Score

Practice Time

Calculate the Following Apdex Score

Lab Solution

Alert Policies

Terms for this Section

Alert Channel

Notification method. Email is the only channel used by default, but mobile push notifications, pagerduty, hipchat, campfire, and webhooks are also configurable.

Alert Policy

A grouping mechanism for most alertables (servers, applications, and key transactions).

Alert Fatique

Occurs when user become indifferent due to excessive alerts.

New Relic Alerting

New Relic alerting enables you to...

Find out about problems within your infrastructure as they develop
Get the right alert to the right people, but avoid alert fatigue
Configurable thresholds, set once per application
Configurable recipients and methods

Two Kinds of Alerts

Threshhold Alerts

Only be listed within the NR UI

Usually lead to alerts being sent outside of NR

Configuring Threshold

Most alerts are based on metrics crossing thresholds:

Just like an alarm clock, if you set the threshold lower than the current value of the the metric, it will not alert until the metric drops below the threshold and then rises above it again.

Downtime Alerts

Grouping Servers & Applications w/ Alert Policies

Accounts with >1 app and/or server can effectively group alertables to manage alerts more easily

Alert Notifications

You can modify alert notifications by defining alert policies or by using the alert API settings in New Relic's REST API. You can have alerts sent to: