Create a plugin

Limited access to legacy plugins

As of December 2, 2020, plugin access has been limited to accounts that have accessed a legacy plugin in the past 30 days. The legacy plugin experience will reach end of life (EoL) as of June 16, 2021. For more information, see our Explorers Hub post.

Plugin SDKs

To get started with writing a plugin agent that generates example metric data, refer to the README files in GitHub for the Plugin agent SDK, including:

• Java
• .NET
• Ruby

Chef and Puppet installation templates

After developing a plugin with a plugin SDK, you can use Chef and Puppet installation scripts. This makes plugin installation easier from Plugin Central in New Relic, especially when your plugin has required runtime dependencies, such as Java or Ruby. Managing plugins with user permissions and startup scripts also is easier.

Several Chef and Puppet installation scripts have been written for supported plugins. You can use these Chef recipes and Puppet manifests as templates for other plugins. For more information about installation scripts for plugins in Plugin Central, see:

• Chef cookbook for New Relic
• Puppet module for New Relic

Multiple agents example

This is an example of how to configure your plugin to create multiple agents with different configurations. In this example:

• The plugin is called Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia has 3 hosts: English, Spanish, and German.
• Each host uses a different port in New Relic Plugins.

agents:
    wikipedia
      -
        hostname: en.wikipedia.org
        port: 80
      -
        hostname: sp.wikipedia.org
        port: 81
      -
        hostname: de.wikipedia.org
        port: 82

agent_human_labels("Wikipedia") { "Wikipedia on #{hostname} on port # {port}" }
agent_config_options :hostname, :port

SaaS developer plugins

The Plugin API is useful when you need to:

• Use a programming language not supported by the plugin SDKs.
• Write plugins to in-house standards or as part of a larger running application.
• Report metrics for a large number of individual accounts.

The Plugin API can be used by plugin developers to POST metrics for multiple components (instances) directly to the New Relic collectors using JSON. Each POST typically is consumed by the collector in under 3ms, so this is a very fast way to send large amounts of metric data.

# Ruby language example

# Define the Plugin API endpoint URL
url = URI.parse("https://platform-api.newrelic.com/platform/v1/metrics")

# Assuming the Account model has a scope that provides all accounts
# having a New Relic license key, fetch those accounts and iterate
# over them to POST the metrics to New Relic Plugins

Account.with_new_relic_license.each do |account|
  # Prepare an HTTP POST request
  request = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url.request_uri)

  # Set the BODY to the JSON structure containing the metrics
  request.body = account.gather_new_relic_metrics.as_json

  # Set the required headers
  request.add_field('X-License-Key', account.new_relic_license_key)
  request.add_field('Content-Type', 'application/json')
  request.delete('accept') # Need to remove the default 'Accept: */*'
  request.add_field('Accept', 'application/json')

  # Post the metric data to the New Relic Servers
  response = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port).start do |http|
    http.request(request)
  end

  # Test for success
  success = JSON.parse(response.body)['status'] == 'ok'
end

{
  "agent": {
    "host" : "host.service_name.com",
    "pid" : 1234,
    "version" : "1.0.0"
  },
  "components": [
    {
      "name": "Database Server",
      "guid": "com.saas_company_name.postgresql",
      "duration" : 60,
      "metrics" : {
        "Component/Connections/Bytes received[bytes/sec]" : 200,
        "Component/Connections/Bytes sent[bytes/sec]" : 30,
        "Component/Queries/Query rate[Queries/sec]" : 10
      }
    },
    {
      "name": "Cache Server",
      "guid": "com.saas_company_name.memcached",
      "duration" : 60,
      "metrics" : {
        "Component/Cache/Writes[count]" : 220,
        "Component/Cache/Hits[count]" : 300,
        "Component/Cache/Misses[count]" : 100,
        "Component/Cache/Memory/Used[bytes]" : 1000,
        "Component/Cache/Memory/Free[bytes]" : 10
      }
    },
    {
      "name": "Message Queue",
      "guid": "com.saas_company_name.sidekiq",
      "duration" : 60,
      "metrics" : {
        "Component/Jobs/Queued[count]" : 2000,
        "Component/Jobs/Running[count]" : 100,
        "Component/Jobs/Failed[count]" : 10,
        "Component/Jobs/Processed[count]" : 1000000
      }
    }
  ]
}

View plugin usage

After you publish your plugin, New Relic will update usage data about accounts and components or instances every 24 hours, including:

• Number of accounts using your plugin
• Components or instances that are reporting data
• Review comments
• Ratings

Plugins that are publicly published in Plugin Central will have more details in the Usage dashboard than unlisted (privately published) ones. In addition to providing a central location to examine review comments and ratings, the Usage dashboard is useful for verifying public information about the plugin, including the download link and a shortcut link to Plugin Central.

Anyone on the authoring account can view the published plugin's Usage dashboard.

1. Go to one.newrelic.com > More > Plugins, and select the plugin's name or icon.
2. From the plugin's Summary page, select Usage.