There are several ways New Relic lets you create your own integration:
- General telemetry (metrics, traces) solutions: Use our Telemetry SDKs.
- Build a custom New Relic app that uses your own JavaScript UI functionality.
- If you have New Relic Infrastructure, you can use our lightweight Flex integration tool (recommended) or use our Integrations SDK to build a complete Infrastructure on-host integration.
Important
New Relic is transitioning to rely on open source standards like Prometheus for future on-host integrations. Though the infrastructure SDK is the foundation of that transition, some of the tutorials and tools around this SDK might not be up-to-date with the latest developments.
What is the Integrations SDK?
Our Infrastructure Integrations SDK lets you build an on-host integration that reports custom data from your hosts or services. That data can then be found in New Relic Infrastructure and can be used to create custom queries and charts.
What data can you report with an on-host integration?
When you build an integration using the Integrations SDK, you assign the entities that report data. In New Relic terms, entity is a purposefully ambiguous term meaning something that reports data to New Relic (for example: a local host, a load balancer, or a database).
A single integration can report data from multiple entities, which gives you the ability to report data from more than one service or host instance.
There are three types of data an entity can generate:
- Metrics: Metric data is used for numerical measurement data. Examples: how many requests are in a queue, or the number of hits on a database per minute. Metric data from a custom integration can be queried and used to create dashboards.
- Inventory: Live system state and configuration information. This data will show up on the Infrastructure Inventory UI page.
- Events: Events are used to record important activities on a system. Examples: a service starting or a new table being created. Event data will be shown in the Infrastructure Events UI page.
Create a custom integration
To create an integration using the Integrations SDK, use these resources:
- See the Go language build tools and tutorial. The tutorial walks you through creating a Redis integration in Go. (Note: Go is not required; it's just the language for which we provide additional build tools. For more information, see Integrations SDK requirements.)
- See the integration file structure documentation, which describes the files required to create an integration.