Using New Relic to Monitor Applications on OpenShift

New Relic offers application performance monitoring and software analytics solutions. They provide tools for monitoring your applications, end user activities (from browsers and mobile devices), databases (SQLDB and NoSQL), caching systems, load balancers, and many other components that you use in your infrastructure, bringing all this data to a central event database for analytics purposes. New Relic brings application performance monitoring services to Red Hat's certified container ecosystem, offering agents for six languages (Java, Ruby, .NET, Python, node.js, and PHP). By incorporating New Relic's container into your application, you create runtime instrumentation for your application code. This gives these agents the ability to detect problems at the line of code inside of your application.

In this blog, we show a way to configure New Relic to monitor an application running on OpenShift Container Platform. The repository includes a customized assemble script for Tomcat/JBoss EWS 8 that instruments an application using a New Relic Java Agent. The script for downloading and layering in New Relic Agent is baked into this assemble script.

We will follow this with an example where we trigger a binary application deployment using a WAR file (I will use petstore.war. You can use any application war file of your choice).

Prerequisites

You are registered with New Relic and have a valid license key

Steps

Step 1: Clone the source code from the git repository

The git repo https://github.com/VeerMuchandi/newrelic-ews8 includes the customized assemble script for binary deployment.

$ git clone https://github.com/VeerMuchandi/newrelic-ews8

Cloning into 'newrelic-ews8'...

remote: Counting objects: 7, done.

remote: Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.

remote: Total 7 (delta 0), reused 7 (delta 0), pack-reused 0

Unpacking objects: 100% (7/7), done

This will create a directory with name newrelic-ews8. Change into this folder.

cd newrelic-ews8

Step 2: Create a Build

Review the .s2i/bin/assemble script. The script expects three environment variables during the build.

• WAR_FILE_URL that provides the URL for the application war that you are trying to deploy
• NEWRELIC_LICENSE that provides the value for the New Relic license key
• NEWRELIC_APPNAME that provides the name of your application on the NewRelic console

We will now create a new build of type binary. I am deploying a petstore.war and naming my application as petstore. Note that I am supplying values for the three build environment variables explained above.

Note If you are copy-pasting, substitute your NewRelicLicenseKey.

$ oc new-build --binary --name=petstore -l app=petstore \

--image-stream=jboss-webserver30-tomcat8-openshift \

--env WAR_FILE_URL=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/VeerMuchandi/ps/master/deployments/ROOT.war  \

NEWRELIC_LICENSE=<<YourNewRelicLicenseKey>> \

NEWRELIC_APPNAME=mypetstore

--> Found image eee1cf7 (11 weeks old) in image stream "openshift/jboss-webserver30-tomcat8-openshift" under tag "latest" for "jboss-webserver30-tomcat8-openshift"

You can run oc describe bc/petstore to view the build configuration that just got created.

Step 3: Start the build and deploy the application

Now let us start the build by pushing the code from the current directory. This will upload the contents in the current directory and follow the build until it is complete. Note that it downloads the application war file from the location I specified, and the New Relic Java agent. It bakes it into the application container image and stores the image in the OpenShift Container Registry.

$ oc start-build petstore --from-dir=. --follow

Uploading directory "." as binary input for the build ...

build "petstore-1" started

Receiving source from STDIN as archive ...

DEPRECATED: Use .s2i/bin instead of .sti/bin

Now let us deploy this application. It uses the existing imagestream with name petstore and create the application deployment configuration and service. Following this, the deployment starts and a pod starts running.

$ oc new-app petstore -l app=petstore

--> Found image f249c21 (23 seconds old) in image stream "newrelic/petstore" under tag "latest" for "petstore"

Next, expose the service to create a route.

$ oc expose svc petstore

route "petstore" exposed 

You can check the route created by running oc get route.

Step 4: Run the application and test in New Relic.

Use the above application in the browser for a little while.

Now go to your New Relic Console. Go to New Relic APM. You should find your application with the name you configured for NEWRELIC_APPNAME. In my case that is configured as mypetstoreabove. Click on the application name and you should start seeing the transaction data as shown below.

Summary

We saw how easy it is to integrate New Relic agent into a container image and run it on OpenShift with minor customization to the S2I assemble script. You can follow similar approach for other languages/technologies.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Donald Slanec from New Relic for helping out with this code example.