New in New Relic 😊?
We have recently moved to New Relic as a monitoring and alerting solution for the services we run and support. Our services run on Bare Metal, Virtual Machines, Managed Servers etc. The transition from our previous monitoring and alerting tool was quite easy and straight forward. New Relic really makes it so easy to get on board for a tech person with basic understanding on how systems work.
We also found really usefull the simplicity of New Relic monitoring opinioned Host and Application views that work out of the box. And really helpfull custom dashboards.
What to avoid 🧨
Lots of things i suppose could be better setup or managed. But IMHO, when new in New Relic the following should get your attention:
PHP_FPM Tracing
When debugging an application, Tracing can be your swiss knife. In normal execution though it can drain all your available monthly data plan. I would suggest to disable it for your application when in non debugging state. To disable tracing for PHP_FPM set the tracing parameter to false in the followng PHP_FPM configuration file and restart the engine.
/etc/php/7.4/fpm/conf.d/20-newrelic.ini newrelic.distributed_tracing_enabled = false
What to adjust 😉
Display Name
New Relic uses the hostname as defined in a server (virtual or not) . This solution kickstarts the agent deployment and easily joins a server in your New Relic monitoring infrastructure. Sometimes thought you would like to have an alias or a better name for a server when displayed in your New Relic Host Dashboards. To achieve this alter the display_name parameter in
/etc/newrelic-infra.yml display_name: "My Desired Host Name"