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Collector for host monitoring

You can collect metrics and logs from your infrastructure hosts with OpenTelemetry and leverage the same infrastructure experiences that are available for New Relic agents. Specific receivers and processors are required in the OTel collector to collect and report host telemetry.

If you're looking for help with other collector use cases, see the newrelic-opentelemetry-examples repository.

Step 1: Prerequisites

Make sure you've completed the following before going further:

  • If you haven't already done so, sign up for a free New Relic account.
  • Get the for the New Relic account to which you want to report data.

Step 2: Install the OpenTelemetry Collector

To do a basic installation for single hosts in the cloud or on-premises, see OpenTelemetry's instructions for up-to-date installation steps from the community. Instructions are available for the following:

  • Linux: Debian systems
  • Linux: Red Hat
  • Windows
  • Docker, Kubernetes, and other options

Your deployment experience might vary depending on which vendor-specific distributions you use. For example, installation via a package manager might be available for Linux hosts.

Important

To set up infrastructure monitoring, you need to install and configure components that are included in the collector-contrib release. For example, the host receiver is required to collect basic host metrics such as CPU, memory, disk, and network stats and is only available in the OpenTelemetry Collector-contrib release.

Step 3: Configure host metrics and logs

This collector example is meant to serve as a starting point from which you can extend, customize, and validate configurations before using them in production.

The collector-contrib release includes:

  • The hostmetrics receiver that generates metrics about the system scraped from various sources. Deploy the collector as an agent when you use a hostmetrics receiver.
  • The filelog receiver that tails and parses logs from files.

When using the hostmetrics receiver as part of the collector configuration, New Relic will detect host metrics as part of a Host entity. This means you will have the same experience as with the New Relic infrastructure agent. To make this work, you need to meet the following configuration requirements:

  • host.id attribute is present in host metrics.
  • service.name and container.id attributes are not present in host metrics.

Learn more about available metrics and advanced configurations from the OpenTelemetry documentation in GitHub.

Here is a sample configuration YAML file for a Linux host. Be sure to do the following:

  • Replace OTLP_ENDPOINT_HERE with the appropriate endpoint.
  • Replace YOUR_KEY_HERE with your .
  • Adjust the target log files in the filelog receiver section based on your requirements.
  • Adjust the memory_limiter default values based on your environment requirements.
extensions:
health_check:
receivers:
otlp:
protocols:
grpc:
http:
hostmetrics:
collection_interval: 20s
scrapers:
cpu:
metrics:
system.cpu.utilization:
enabled: true
load:
memory:
metrics:
system.memory.utilization:
enabled: true
disk:
filesystem:
metrics:
system.filesystem.utilization:
enabled: true
network:
paging:
metrics:
system.paging.utilization:
enabled: true
processes:
process:
metrics:
process.cpu.utilization:
enabled: true
process.cpu.time:
enabled: false
filelog:
include:
- /var/log/alternatives.log
- /var/log/cloud-init.log
- /var/log/auth.log
- /var/log/dpkg.log
- /var/log/syslog
- /var/log/messages
- /var/log/secure
- /var/log/yum.log
processors:
transform/truncate:
trace_statements:
- context: span
statements:
- truncate_all(attributes, 4095)
- truncate_all(resource.attributes, 4095)
log_statements:
- context: log
statements:
- truncate_all(attributes, 4095)
- truncate_all(resource.attributes, 4095)
memory_limiter:
check_interval: 1s
limit_mib: 1000
spike_limit_mib: 200
batch:
resourcedetection:
detectors: [env, system]
system:
hostname_sources: ["os"]
resource_attributes:
host.id:
enabled: true
resourcedetection/cloud:
detectors: ["gcp", "ec2", "azure"]
timeout: 2s
override: false
# fallback for running via mac or docker to ensure Infra UI will pick up data
resource:
attributes:
- key: host.id
value: localhost
action: insert
exporters:
otlphttp:
endpoint: OTLP_ENDPOINT_HERE
headers:
api-key: YOUR_KEY_HERE
logging:
service:
pipelines:
metrics:
receivers: [hostmetrics]
processors: [memory_limiter, resourcedetection, resourcedetection/cloud, batch]
exporters: [logging, otlphttp]
traces:
receivers: [otlp]
processors: [memory_limiter, transform/truncate, resourcedetection, resourcedetection/cloud, batch]
exporters: [logging, otlphttp]
logs:
receivers: [otlp, filelog]
processors: [memory_limiter, transform/truncate, resourcedetection, resourcedetection/cloud, batch]
exporters: [logging, otlphttp]
extensions: [health_check]

Step 4: View your data

You can view your collector data in a variety of places in the New Relic UI.

Browse host data in infrastructure UI

By using the recommended configuration in the collector, you can view data through the standard features in the Infrastructure UI experience.

Query host metrics and logs

Once telemetry is successfully ingested in New Relic, they are available in metrics and events and query builder.

The following NRQL queries show examples to help you explore the metrics you received:

  • Listing number of metric updates ingested by metric name

    SELECT count(*) FROM Metric WHERE metricName LIKE 'system.%' FACET metricName LIMIT max
  • Querying specific metrics faceted by host

    SELECT average(system.disk.operations) FROM Metric FACET host.name TIMESERIES
  • Listing dimensions available for a given metric

    SELECT keyset() FROM Metric WHERE metricName = 'system.disk.operations'
  • Querying number of log events per host

    SELECT count(*) FROM Log FACET host.name TIMESERIES

Learn more about querying the metric data type.

What's next?

After you set up your collector, check out our best practices guide for tips to improve your use of OpenTelemetry and New Relic.

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