Flex Workshop, New Relic O11y Days

©2008–22 New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved
@LeonAdato
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© 2022 New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved.
Closing gaps in visibility
With New Relic Flex
Leon Adato
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Leon Adato
• Principal DevRel Advocate @ New Relic
• Started in tech ~33 yrs ago
• Focus on monitoring for ~20 yrs
• Tivoli, BMC, OpenView, Nagios, SolarWinds
Perl scripts, batch files,
and New Relic (duh)
• Built monitoring for small, medium,
and ludicrous size orgs.
• @LeonAdato almost everywhere

This is an Oyster Talk™
● Installing the Infrastructure agent
● YAML and the Flex directory
● Flex and command line output
● Flex and script output
● Flex and JSON output
● Troubleshooting

©2008–22 New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved
@LeonAdato

What isn’t (always) covered
● Standard commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software
○ Exchange, Sharepoint, Blackberry, SAP, Storage
management, etc.
● Customized standard software
○ SAP, Wordpress, Drupal, etc)
● Custom data found in custom-built applications

Why you need* custom monitoring values
If what you need isn’t built into your monitoring / observability tool, you can:
● Place a feature request with the vendor, asking to add the metric.
○ And then wait. And pray. And maybe scream if you think it will help**
● Ask the community if/how they've solved the issue
○ IF there's an active community.
● Start shopping for yet-another-monitoring-tool
* probably
** spoiler: It won’t.

That sounds dumb
Or - and just hear me out - you could use your
monitoring / observability tool’s BUILT-IN ability to
collect custom metrics.
DUH!

What is Flex?
● Application-agnostic integration into New Relic
● Samples & more
https://github.com/newrelic/nri-flex

Agent
YAML
How does Flex ACTUALLY work?
Data!

YAML starter kit for the uninitiated
integrations:
- name: nri-flex
config:
name: NameyMcNameyFace
apis:
- event_type: <something here>
<lots more stuff here>

What can Flex do?
Collect metrics from a variety of outputs, and seamlessly send them
to New Relic for display on dashboards, use in alerts, etc. It can grab
data from
● A utility’s <stdout>.
● The output or return values of a script or program.
● JSON data generated by a local application.
● JSON data returned from a web page or external API call.
● Data scraped from a web page.

OK, but what is that in real life?
● LinuxAteMyRam.com - why sysadmins drink
● The IOT coffee pot - why security admins drink
● Everyone blaming the network - why network engineers drink
● A bunch of Oracle servers, and no way to get specific metrics.
● A different customer had >4k batch jobs per day, and needed
specific information on completion, size, return codes, etc.
● Or even finding the IIS space station and checking if your
current weather conditions will let you see it.

LESSON 1: Install the New Relic infra agent

LESSON 2: Your First YAML
integrations:
- name: nri-flex
config:
name: linuxFileSystemIntegration
apis:
- name: TestFlex
commands:
- run: 'df -PT -B1 -x tmpfs -x xfs -x vxfs -x btrfs -x ext -x ext2 -x ext3'
split: horizontal
split_by: s+
row_start: 1
set_header: [fs,fsType,capacityBytes,usedBytes,availableBytes,usedPerc,mountedOn]
perc_to_decimal: true

LESSON 3: The Necessary NRQL
FROM TestFlexSample SELECT average(availableBytes) TIMESERIES

LESSON 4: Flex with script output
integrations:
- name: nri-flex
timeout: 5m
interval: 10m
config:
name: linuxspeedtest
apis:
- name: pyspeedtest
commands:
- run: sudo python3 /flexlab/NR_checkspeed.py
split: horizontal
split_by: s+
set_header: [latency,download,upload]
timeout: 300000

LESSON 5: More NRQL
FROM pyspeedtestSample
SELECT average(download), average(upload)
TIMESERIES

LESSON 6: Flex with JSON output
integrations:
- name: nri-flex
timeout: 5m
interval: 10m
config:
name: linuxspeedtest
apis:
- name: speedtest
commands:
- run: speedtest --accept-license --accept-gcp -f json
timeout: 300000
remove_keys:
- timestamp

LESSON 7: Still more NRQL
FROM speedtestSample
select average(download.bandwidth)/125000,
average(upload.bandwidth)/125000
TIMESERIES

LESSON 8: Troubleshooting*
sudo /var/db/newrelic-infra/newrelic-integrations/bin/nri-flex
--verbose --pretty --config_file <path>/<your yaml>.yml
Edit /etc/newrelic-infra.yml
log:
file: '/var/log/newrelic-infra/newrelic-infra.log'
level: debug
forward: true
stdout: false
* and other swear words

Flex Workshop, New Relic O11y Days

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