On: New Relic opens its public platform to monitor all...

[coopr]

This has been my main project for months - I'd love to hear what the HN community thinks.

[kawsper → coopr]

Why didn't you go with statsd or graphite? You would have gotten a lot of bindings with that.

[lmirosevic → kawsper]

Can I ask you why use graphite over SaaS based monitoring like scout, etc.? I'm genuinely curious. Is it just because it's free?

[kawsper → lmirosevic]

I haven't used Scout but I have the same problems with that as I do with NewRelic. Their plugins is built for their vendor agent. With that said I do like the opensource plugins of Scout.

The issue is that we are now a lot of people that tries to solve the same kind of problems. Everyone seems to be writing collectors that reports information to backends.

On top of my head I can name:

http://opensource.brightcove.com/project/diamond/ http://collectl.sourceforge.net/ http://collectd.org/

They all implement some kind of RRD or Graphite service hooks. It would be nice if all I should do to upgrade was to point my existing collectd collectors to NewRelic or Scout and be good to go.

Instead, I now have to reconfigure my whole stack, install their agent, add their plugins for my software, make sure things are working and then switch.

I am not advocating that everyone should use Graphite, I am just advocating that we should have some consistency between these systems, so we can use the same collectors no matter what the backend is.

I had a feeling that Graphite+Statsd was where the community was heading given that both Etsy and Github are using that.

[coopr → kawsper]

Try a New Relic plugin and you'll find out why ;)

The experience of adding monitoring with a New Relic plugin should be MUCH better than with any other monitoring approach.

[kawsper → coopr]

I still need to rewrite all my statsd/graphite implementations.

Could you tell me what differs in your solution, and why it is better? And why you didn't choose Graphite/Carbon or statsd?

[jpadilla_ → coopr]

Can New Relic-Heroku users use plugins or is it limited only to New Relic only users?

[coopr → jpadilla_]

Yes!

[mey → coopr]

Is there pricing information available yet? I only see pricing for web app/mobile app.

[jmondo → mey]

it's all free!

[vehementi → jmondo]

What does that mean about pay service? Is that now free? Am I missing the distinction between what's on the linked page and the normal webapp monitoring service?

[ben1040 → vehementi]

It looks like the main reason to pay is for data retention -- otherwise the free service only gives you 24 hours of data. IIRC that was also the distinction between the previous services New Relic offered, free for 24 hours, pay for more.

[vehementi → ben1040]

Old (?) free accounts did not have full analysis tools - you could not break down slow requests etc. with Java monitoring, only see the average response time over a time range.

[pathy → vehementi]

As far as I can tell it is an addition to the normal monitoring? I can download the plugins via their standard dashboard.

[coopr → pathy]

Correct, this is a new feature, in addition to all our existing features. This feature is available at all plan levels, but some other New Relic features require a paid plan.

[coopr → jmondo]

Using, authoring, and publishing plugins is free. If you have a paid New Relic account, all this goodness costs $0 extra - same if you have a free New Relic account.

[cagenut → coopr]

netscaler support please!

[coopr → cagenut]

You'd like to see NetScaler monitored by a New Relic plugin? Great - build it! If NetScaler makes it easy to get out metrics (SNMP?) then writing a plugin might take only a day or less.