Find the New Relic Wikipedia Example plugin in the New Relic storefront
Find the New Relic Wikipedia plugin in Plugin Central
- A New Relic account. Sign up for a free account here
- .NET 3.5 or later
- Windows 7/Server 2008 or later
This plugin can be installed one of the following ways:
The New Relic Platform Installer (NPI) is a simple, lightweight command line tool that helps you easily download, configure and manage New Relic Platform Plugins. If you're interested in learning more simply go to our forum category and checkout the 'Getting Started' section. If you have any questions, concerns or feedback, please do not hesitate to reach out through the forums as we greatly appreciate your feedback!
Once you've installed the NPI tool, run the following command:
./npi install com.newrelic.examples.wikipedia
This command will take care of the creation of newrelic.json and plugin.json configuration files. See the configuration information section for more information.
The latest version of the plugin can be downloaded here. Once the plugin is on your box, extract it to a location of your choosing.
note - This plugin is distributed in tar.gz format and can be extracted with the following command on Unix-based systems (Windows users will need to download a third-party extraction tool or use the New Relic Platform Installer):
tar -xvzf newrelic_wikipedia_plugin-vX.Y.Z.tar.gz
Check out the configuration information section for details on configuring your plugin.
To run the plugin, execute the following command from a terminal or command window (assuming you are in the directory where the plugin was extracted):
.\plugin.exe
Step 3 showed you how to run the plugin; however, there are several problems with running the process directly in the foreground (For example, when the machine reboots the process will not be started again). That said, there are several common ways to keep a plugin running, but they do require more advanced knowledge or additional tooling. We highly recommend considering using the New Relic Platform Installer as it will take care of most of the heavy lifting for you.
If you prefer to be more involved in the maintaince of the process, consider one of these tools for managing your plugin process (bear in mind that some of these are OS-specific):
You will need to modify two configuration files in order to set this plugin up to run. The first (newrelic.json) contains configurations used by all Platform plugins (e.g. license key, logging information, proxy settings) and can be shared across your plugins. The second (plugin.json) contains data specific to each plugin such as a list of hosts and port combination for what you are monitoring. Templates for both of these files should be located in the 'config' directory in your extracted plugin folder.
The plugin.json file has a provided template in the config directory named plugin.template.json. If you are installing manually, make a copy of this template file and rename it to plugin.json (the New Relic Platform Installer will automatically handle creation of configuration files for you).
Below is an example of the plugin.json file's contents, you can add multiple objects to the "agents" array to monitor different instances:
{
"agents": [
{
"name" : "Wikipedia - English",
"host" : "en.wikipedia.org"
},
{
"name" : "Wikipedia - French",
"host" : "fr.wikipedia.org"
},
{
"name" : "Wikipedia - German",
"host" : "de.wikipedia.org"
}
]
}
note - The "name" attribute is used to identify specific instances in the New Relic UI.
The newrelic.json file also has a provided template in the config directory named newrelic.template.json. If you are installing manually, make a copy of this template file and rename it to newrelic.json (again, the New Relic Platform Installer will automatically handle this for you).
The newrelic.json is a standardized file containing configuration information that applies to any plugin (e.g. license key, logging, proxy settings), so going forward you will be able to copy a single newrelic.json file from one plugin to another. Below is a list of the configuration fields that can be managed through this file:
Your New Relic license key is the only required field in the newrelic.json file as it is used to determine what account you are reporting to. If you do not know what your license key is, you can learn about it here.
Example:
{
"license_key": "YOUR_LICENSE_KEY_HERE"
}
By default Platform plugins will have their logging turned on; however, you can manage these settings with the following configurations:
log_level - The log level. Valid values: [debug, info, warn, error, fatal]. Defaults to info.
log_file_name - The log file name. Defaults to newrelic_plugin.log.
log_file_path - The log file path. Defaults to logs.
log_limit_in_kbytes - The log file limit in kilobytes. Defaults to 25600 (25 MB). If limit is set to 0, the log file size would not be limited.
Example:
{
"license_key": "YOUR_LICENSE_KEY_HERE"
"log_level": "debug",
"log_file_path": "/var/logs/newrelic"
}
If you are running your plugin from a machine that runs outbound traffic through a proxy, you can use the following optional configurations in your newrelic.json file:
proxy_host - The proxy host (e.g. webcache.example.com)
proxy_port - The proxy port (e.g. 8080). Defaults to 80 if a proxy_host is set
proxy_username - The proxy username
proxy_password - The proxy password
Example:
{
"license_key": "YOUR_LICENSE_KEY_HERE",
"proxy_host": "proxy.mycompany.com",
"proxy_port": 9000
}
Plugin support and troubleshooting assistance can be obtained by visiting support.newrelic.com
Q: I've started this plugin, now what?
A: Once you have a plugin reporting with the proper license key, log into New Relic here. If everything was successful, you should see a new navigation item appear on the left navigation bar identifying your new plugin (This may take a few minutes). Click on this item to see the metrics for what you were monitoring (bear in mind, some details -- such as summary metrics -- may take several minutes to show values).
The New Relic Platform uses an extensible architecture that allows you to define new metrics beyond the provided defaults. To expose more data, fork this repository, create a new GUID, add the metrics you would like to collect to the code and then build summary metrics and dashboards to expose your newly collected metrics.
You are welcome to send pull requests to us - however, by doing so you agree that you are granting New Relic a non-exclusive, non-revokable, no-cost license to use the code, algorithms, patents, and ideas in that code in our products if we so choose. You also agree the code is provided as-is and you provide no warranties as to its fitness or correctness for any purpose.