Puppet and New Relic Deployments

One of the neat features of New Relic is the ability to report when deployment events take place so you can watch and model their impact on your applications. New Relic has a Deployment API that processes incoming events.

Since a lot of you deploy your applications with Puppet and like me many of you also use New Relic, I decided to add some simple integration from Puppet to New Relic for reporting on deployments. I’ve just released a module called Puppet-NewRelic which provides two alternate types of integration:

• A Puppet type called newrelic_notify that will send deployment notifications to NewRelic via the Deployment API.

• A Puppet report processor for sending deployment events to NewRelic via the Deployment API.

This is the documentation for the module:

Requirements

• Puppet 2.6.5 or later
• newrelic_api gem
• You will need to enable API access to your New Relic account. To do this, go to Account settings (upper right corner of the New Relic site), and then click on Integrations => Data Sharing. Select API access, and enable it.

Installation

1. Install the newrelic_api gem on your Puppet master

   $ sudo gem install newrelic_api
   

2. Install puppet-newrelic as a module in your Puppet master’s module path.

Usage

To install the NewRelic RPM and API gems on the hosts with deployed applications declare the newrelic class.

class { 'newrelic':
  enabled => 'true',
}

Type and Provider

1. To use the newrelic_notify type enable pluginsync on your master and clients in puppet.conf

   [master]
   pluginsync = true
   [agent]
   pluginsync = true
   

2. Run the Puppet client and sync the type and provider as a plugin

3. You can then use the type and provider like so:

   newrelic_notify { '123456':
     ensure      => present,
     api_key     => 'abc123',
     description => 'Notify New Relic that Application Bob was
   

deployed.’, revision => ‘This is rev 1.0.1’, user => ‘Puppet’, }

The `description`, `revision`, and `user` parameters are optional.

Report processor

1. To use the New Relic report processor update the api_key variable in the newrelic.yaml file with your New Relic API key.

   ---
   :api_key: 'abc123'
   

2. Add a list of your hosts to newrelic.yaml and match each host to the New Relic application deployed on it. Currently this is ugly and only supports one application per host. Anyone with ideas on how to do it better is welcomed. :)

   ---
   :api_key: 'abc123'
   :hosts:
     - {host: 'hostname1', key: '123456'}
     - {host: 'hostname2', key: '123456'}
   

   You can get the Application ID key from the New Relic url, for example: https://rpm.newrelic.com/accounts/17710/applications/56658. Where 56658 is the Application ID key.

3. Copy newrelic.yaml to /etc/puppet.

4. Enable pluginsync and reports on your master and clients in puppet.conf

   [master]
   report = true
   reports = newrelic
   pluginsync = true
   [agent]
   report = true
   pluginsync = true
   

5. Run the Puppet client and sync the report as a plugin