Creating a user-configurable New Relic Plugin

Question

I've been playing around with the New Relic Ruby SDK and created a proof-of-concept plugin which gets data out of Graphite, and sends it to New Relic.

Other plugins I've seen target a well-known set of data (e.g. Apache Requests or CPU load). However, in this case I cannot pre-configure the dashboards for publishing, because the data for each user will be completely different, depending on how they configure it and the data they store on their graphite.

Is there a way to publish a plugin without a pre-configured dashboard / charts?

Answer 1

Every New Relic published plugin necessarily includes a Dashboard. You could record metrics like "Component/Graphite/" and then expose the results generically in your associated dashboard with "Component/Graphite/*". Most likely those won't be very useful graphs.

If you treat this as a Graphite plugin SDK for users who want to easily collect Graphite metrics by configuration, it will make more sense. When doing this, you should make the GUID configurable as well and include clear instructions on changing the GUID for each use of the SDK. That way, users will get their own fresh Dashboards each time their use your SDK.

Answer 2

Yoav, I strongly suggest you do not distribute your plugin agent with a GUID in place (you currently have com.gingerlime.graphite.graphite).

If another user runs your agent with their New Relic license key, and doesn't change the GUID, they will be unable to customize their plugin dashboards, and any customizing you do will not be seen by them.

In other words, un-published plugins should not be distributed publicly - anyone that uses a un-published plugin will have a bad experience (unless they first customize the GUID).