Install New Relic PHP agent in GAE flexible environment

With APM's PHP agent, you can monitor applications that reside in the Google App Engine (GAE) flexible environment. Adding New Relic to your GAE flex app gives you insight into the health and performance of your app and extends GAE with metrics you can view in APM, browser monitoring, and dashboards.

This document explains how to add New Relic to your GAE flex app by configuring a custom runtime, and gives an example of deploying a PHP app with Docker.

Build a custom runtime using Docker

See Google's documentation for building custom runtimes. This example describes how to add New Relic to your GAE flex app by installing the New Relic PHP agent, building a custom runtime, and deploying a single PHP application via Debian. For best results with the GAE flex environment, always use Debian.

For more information about deploying and configuring your PHP app in the GAE flexible environment, see:

• Google App Engine's documentation for PHP
• Google App Engine's tutorials to deploy a PHP app

FROM gcr.io/google-appengine/php:latest
ENV DOCUMENT_ROOT /app

RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update; DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y install wget sudo
RUN wget -O - https://download.newrelic.com/548C16BF.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
RUN echo 'deb http://apt.newrelic.com/debian/ newrelic non-free' | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/newrelic.list
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y install newrelic-php5
RUN NR_INSTALL_KEY="new-relic-license-key" NR_INSTALL_SILENT=true newrelic-install install

env: flex
runtime: custom
runtime_config:
  document_root: .

docker build --rm -t Docker-image-name .

Optional: Disable health checks

Google App Engine sends periodic health check requests to confirm that an instance has been successfully deployed, and to check that a running instance maintains a healthy status. A health check is an HTTP request to the URL /_ah/health.

If you create a custom runtime, your app must be able to handle a large number of health check requests. Otherwise, your app data may not display correctly in APM.

If you notice performance issues, disable GAE health checks. In your app.yaml, add:

health_check:
  enable_health_check: False

Get New Relic agent troubleshooting logs from GAE

Use these resources to troubleshoot your GAE flex environment app:

• To connect to the GAE instance and start a shell in the Docker container running your code, see Debugging an instance.

• To redirect New Relic PHP agent logs to the Stackdriver in the Cloud Platform Console, change the newrelic.yml file to:

  log_file_name: STDOUT

  Copy

• To view the logs, use the Cloud Platform Console's Log Viewer.