The Open-Source Elixir Agent allows you to monitor your Elixir
applications with New Relic. It helps you track transactions, distributed traces and other parts of your application's behavior and provides an overview of underlying BEAM activity.
New Relic has open-sourced this project to enable monitoring of Elixir
applications. This project is provided AS-IS WITHOUT WARRANTY OR SUPPORT, although you can report issues and contribute to the project here on GitHub.
We'd love to get your contributions to improve the elixir agent! Keep in mind when you submit your pull request, you'll need to sign the CLA via the click-through using CLA-Assistant. If you'd like to execute our corporate CLA, or if you have any questions, please drop us an email at open-source@newrelic.com.
Install the Hex package
Requirements:
- Erlang/OTP 21
- Elixir 1.8
defp deps do
[
{:new_relic_agent, "~> 1.0"}
]
end
You need to set a few required configuration keys so we can authenticate properly.
config :new_relic_agent,
app_name: "My App",
license_key: "license_key"
You can also configure these attributes via ENV
vars, which helps keep secrets out of source code.
NEW_RELIC_APP_NAME
NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY
Out of the box, we will report Error Traces & some general BEAM VM stats. For further visibility, you'll need to add some basic instrumentation.
Some Elixir packages are auto-instrumented via telemetry
Ecto
: See NewRelic.Telemetry.Ecto for details.
Plug instrumentation is built into the agent.
NewRelic.Transaction
enables rich Transaction Monitoring for aPlug
pipeline. It's a macro that injects a few plugs and an error handler. Install it by addinguse NewRelic.Transaction
to your Plug module.
defmodule MyPlug do
use Plug.Router
use NewRelic.Transaction
# ...
end
NewRelic.Tracer
enables detailed Function tracing. Annotate a function and it'll show up as a span in Transaction Traces / Distributed Traces, and we'll collect aggregate stats about it. Install it by addinguse NewRelic.Tracer
to any module, and annotating any function with@trace
module attribute
defmodule MyModule do
use NewRelic.Tracer
@trace :func
def func do
# Will report as `MyModule.func/0`
end
end
NewRelic.Tracer
also enables detailed External request tracing. A little more instrumentation is required to pass the trace context forward with Distributed Tracing.
defmodule MyExternalService do
use NewRelic.Tracer
@trace {:request, category: :external}
def request(method, url, headers) do
NewRelic.set_span(:http, url: url, method: method, component: "HttpClient")
headers = headers ++ NewRelic.distributed_trace_headers(:http)
HttpClient.request(method, url, headers)
end
end
NewRelic.Instrumented.Mix.Task
To enable the Agent and record a Transaction during aMix.Task
, simplyuse NewRelic.Instrumented.Mix.Task
. This will ensure the agent is properly started, record the Transaction, and shut down.
defmodule Mix.Tasks.Example do
use Mix.Task
use NewRelic.Instrumented.Mix.Task
def run(args) do
# ...
end
end
NewRelic.Instrumented.HTTPoison
Automatically wraps HTTP calls in a span, and adds an outbound header to track the request as part of a Distributed Trace.
alias NewRelic.Instrumented.HTTPoison
HTTPoison.get("http://www.example.com")
You may start an "Other" Transaction for non-HTTP related work. This could used be while consuming messages from a broker, for example.
To start an other transaction:
NewRelic.start_transaction(category, name)
And to stop the transaction within the same process:
NewRelic.stop_transaction()
There are a few adapters which leverage this agent to provide library / framework specific instrumentation. Note that these will eventually be replaced with telemetry
based instrumentation.