Deploy the .NET agent with the New Relic Kubernetes Agent Operator

This example demonstrates building and deploying a .NET application in Kubernetes, using the New Relic Kubernetes Agent Operator to automatically install the New Relic .NET agent. Note that there is no need to add commands to Dockerfile or use the NewRelic.Agent Nuget package to install the .NET agent as shown in other examples in this repo -- the agent operator takes care of that for you automatically.

Custom Instrumentation Resource Definition

The Kubernetes Agent Operator is added to each namespace that you want to monitor by way of a custom resource definition. You can either add the following Instrumentation.yml file to your Helm chart (as shown in this example under chart/templates), or you can apply the custom resource definition to each namespace with the following command (after following steps 1 through 3 below):

kubectl apply -f Instrumentation.yml -n <your namespace>

Instrumentation.yml:

apiVersion: newrelic.com/v1alpha2
kind: Instrumentation
metadata:
  name: newrelic-instrumentation-dotnet
spec:
  agent:
    language: dotnet
    image: newrelic/newrelic-dotnet-init:latest

This example uses the latest .NET init container (containing the latest .NET agent release) - for an actual production app, you should use a specific version tag. See the .NET Init Container Docker Hub Repo for the full list of available versions.

Installation

This example uses MiniKube, but the same process can be used for other Kubernetes environments.

1. Set the required environment variables:

export NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY=***

2. Add the `k8s-agents-operator Helm chart repository:

helm repo add k8s-agents-operator https://newrelic.github.io/k8s-agents-operator

3. Install the k8s-agents-operator Helm chart:

helm upgrade --install k8s-agents-operator k8s-agents-operator/k8s-agents-operator \
    --set=licenseKey=${NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY}

Note that this example creates a standalone installation of the Kubernetes agent operator. For a production deployment, we recommend installing the agent operator in addition to the nri-bundle - refer to these instructions for more details.

4. Build the .NET test app container:

minikube image build -t weatherforecast:latest .

5. Deploy the .NET test app Helm chart:

helm install test-app-dotnet ./chart/ -n default

6. Start the .NET test app service:

minikube service test-app-dotnet-service

This will show the URL where the service is listening. From a browser, navigate to <url>/WeatherForecast and within a few minutes, you should see a k8s-test-app-dotnet APM entity in the New Relic UI.