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Yet Another New Relic Perfmon Plugin

This project was born from the need to monitor SSAS instances in the wonderful New Relic APM. Nick Floyd's perfmon plugin wouldn't work as it does not collect 64 bit counters and thus we decided to build a quick and dirty one.

Prerequisites

  • Windows Server to locally collect Perfmon counters
  • .Net 3.5 Client Profile
  • A windows service wrapper like NSSM

Customize performance counters collected

The agent loads config/counters.xml file so you have to copy/rename/create your own counter file matching your needs.

As mentioned previously, it's a quick and dirty version and counters.xml is not currently validated with a XSD here is the way we parse it:

  • Counters: root node containing all metric groups
  • MetricGroup: a group of metrics, requires a Name attribute
  • Counter: a performance counter with the following attributes
    • Category: the category of the performance counter (required)
    • Name: the performance counter name (required)
    • Instance: the instance of the performance counter (optional)
    • MetricName: the metric's name reported in New Relic (required)
    • Unit: the metric's unit reported in New Relic (required)
    • ConversionRatio: an optional ratio to declare a 1024^ConversionRatio of the collected metric value

Here is a very simple counters.xml definition

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Counters>
    <MetricGroup Name="OverallMemory">
    <Counter Category="Memory" Name="Pages/sec" MetricName="System Idle" Unit="pages/s" />
    <Counter Category="Memory" Name="Committed Bytes" MetricName="Committed VRAM" Unit="Gigabytes" ConversionRatio="3" />
    <Counter Category="Memory" Name="% Committed Bytes in Use" MetricName="Committed VRAM usage" Unit="%" />
  </MetricGroup>
</Counters>

Out-of-the-box, this plugin collects various performance counters if you do want to monitor an SSAS instance. Two configuration files are available in config folder:

  • Counters.SSAS.2012.xml: SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Performance Counters
  • Counters.SSAS.2014.xml: SQL Server Analysis Services 2014 Performance Counters

Retrieve performance counter names and categories

A very simple way to retrieve them is to use typeperf command line: typeperf -q
Performance counters are unfortunately culture sensitive, the provided configuration files are for en-US version only.

New Relic dashboard configuration

Once the perfmon plugin up and running you need to create a custom dashboard in New Relic. Follow the official documentation available here:

Troubleshooting

  • To output collected metrics set log_level:debug in config\newrelic.json
  • If you do not see the plugin in your dashboard, set your license_key in config\plugin.json