Adding a NewRelic Agent to Your OSv Appliance

By Tzach Livyatan

New Relic is a popular real-time monitoring service for Web and mobile applications.

In the following post I will describe how to add a New Relic monitoring agent to your OSv virtual appliance, using Tomcat as an example.

As first step, go to the New Relic web site and log in or open an account. Following the instructions on the site, you should be prompted to download two files:

newrelic.yml
newrelic.jar

newrelic.yml should already have the your license key in it. If you downloaded the file directly, you should make sure to edit the license line. Make sure to update your application name in the same file. This name will be used in the New Relic GUI.

There are two ways to build an OSv appliance:

Using an OSv build from source
Using Capstan

The first requires cloning OSv source code with Git, as described here. The second assumes you are familiar with Capstan and is described below.

Using Capstan to add a NewRelic Agent

Create a new project directory

mkdir my-tomcat-with-newrelic
cd my-tomcat-with-newrelic

Copy newrelic.jar and newrelic.yml to this location
Create a new Capstanfile with the following contents:

base: cloudius/osv-tomcat

cmdline: >
  /java.so
  -javaagent:/tools/newrelic.jar
  -cp /usr/tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/usr/tomcat/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
  -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/usr/tomcat/conf/logging.properties
  -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager
  -Dcatalina.base=/usr/tomcat
  -Dcatalina.home=/usr/tomcat
  -Djava.io.tmpdir=/usr/tomcat/temp
  org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap
  start

files:
  /tools/newrelic.jar: newrelic.jar
  /tools/newrelic.yml: newrelic.yml

The base OSv image is tomcat, the cmdline include both Tomcat and New Relic options, and the files are the two New Relic files: the JAR and the configuration file.

build the image

capstan build

You are done! you now have a ready VM with Tomcat and a New Relic agent. To run the image locally:

capstan run -n bridge

Go to the New Relic web app, monitor your application, and give yourself a pat on the shoulder :)

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Using Capstan to add a NewRelic Agent

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