Remote monitoring in on-host integrations

From a New Relic perspective, entity is a broad concept. An entity is anything New Relic can identify that has data you can monitor.

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.

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:

Alert verification

Enabling remote monitoring can affect your configured alerts in case they are using any of the values that are affected by this new feature. We strongly recommend checking your existing alerts to make sure they keep on working as expected.

New entity attributes

These attributes are modified in the resulting entity:

  • Display name: New entity unique key (instead of using the display name)
  • Entity GUID: New entity GUID
  • Entity ID: New entity ID
  • Entity key: New entity unique key (instead of using the display name)
  • External key: Using integration entity name (instead of using the agent display)
Changes in recorded metrics

When remote monitoring is enabled, we will add the hostname and port values to all metrics. If the nricluster name or nriservice are defined in the integration configuration file, they will also be decorated.

Unrecorded attributes

Since the integration is now an independent entity which is not attached to the agent, the following agent attributes are not collected:

  • agentName
  • agentVersion
  • coreCount
  • criticalViolationCount
  • fullHostname
  • instanceType
  • kernelVersion
  • linuxDistribution
  • entityType
  • operatingSystem
  • processorCount
  • systemMemoryBytes
  • warningViolationCount
  • Your custom attributes
Updated hostname

For the ApacheSample, RedisSample, CassandraSample, and NginxSample integration metrics, we will use the integration configuration hostname instead of the short hostname from the agent.

When the integration hostname is a loopback address, the agent will replace it in order to guarantee uniqueness.

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