From a New Relic perspective, entity is a broad concept. An entity is anything New Relic can identify that has data you can monitor.
Our on-host integrations can be configured to create their own entity, called a remote entity, by setting the remote_monitoring option to true. If set to false, an integration will be considered a local entity, and the data related to it will be attached to the host entity that the agent creates. Remote monitoring requires infrastructure agent version 1.2.25 or higher.
For the Apache, Cassandra, MySQL, NGINX, and Redis integrations, remote monitoring (and multi-tenancy) is enabled by activating the configuration parameter remote_monitoring.
Important
If your Apache, Cassandra, MySQL, NGINX, or Redis service is located in the same host as the agent, when you activate remote monitoring the resulting entity will be considered as remote, regardless of its actual location. This may affect alerts, alter attributes, and have other effects, as explained here.
Effects of activating remote_monitoring
By enabling remote_monitoring, the integration becomes a different entity which is no longer attached to the infrastructure agent. As a result, the following items may be affected: