You probably already knew it, I built my first k8s cluster on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It gave me a lot of computing power and flexibility for my side projects. Recently my job was to help our team build confidence in New Relic, the monitoring and alerting service, which is well used in many big or small projects.
A little bit more about New Relic
New Relic was found by Lew Crine in 2008, it has more than 1000 employees now (Feb, 2022). It is a perfect story of selling picks and shoves than mining for gold. He started a SaaS for SaaS entrepreneurs to monitor their products.
If you just start a new SaaS project, but you haven’t had any monitoring tools/service, NR worth your trying
How to integrate New Relic with K8s Cluster?
AKA, install the new relic agent to K8s cluster
If you use the automatic installer, it will be very easy.
My habit was to keep all my K8s config in a repo, so I installed through a bit manually way.
kubectl apply -f k8s-dashboard/newrelic-manifest.yamlThere are some pre-built dashboards for k8s.
After initialization
After 1 or 2 minutes for the data/logs collecting.
It works like a charm.
In Sum
It surprised how easy New Relic integration is, and I am also very curious how New Relic guarantee that all data on the cluster/VM/Instance were collected, like all different kinds of logs, different applications, different environment. This might be an interesting topic to investigate in the future. Collecting logs will not be hard, the difficult part will be
- Lower the RAM/CPU usage
- Guarantee logs are not missed accidentally
P.S.
Another interesting topic would be to build a proper dashboard on New Relic for my k8s cluster, like this dashboard for k8s. This dashboard is a pre-built one from New Relic. (Yeah, they do have many pre-built dashboards)
