New Relic-plugins

[djoos]

Sorry for the "group issue" :-), but I'd like to get some feedback you as you've been actively contributing to this cookbook...

A while ago the installation of the MeetMe-plugin was included in the New Relic-cookbook, but there are obviously plenty of other plugins available for the New Relic platform... Do you think New Relic-cookbook should expand to provide an easy installation of plugins or do you think this should just be left over to other cookbooks?

Thanks in advance for your opinion!

Kind regards,
David

@drywheat @gleseur @NathanielMichael @Rud5G @Drecomm @sarkis @eric-tucker @oblador @hhoover @nchaffee @ge1st @bennybauer @onema @cstewart87 @vitaliel @b0d0nne11 @akolesen @aarongeiser @bassrock @jeffbyrnes @pmcjury @RobWu @Benny @bencaron @pmcjury @josegonzalez @atrullmdsol @sethcall @rcolanero @dje @aaronjensen @cgriego

[RobWu]

Would be great if would include other plugins too.

[cstewart87]

How similar are the plugin installations? I think creating some type of LWRP or definition would be the best route, if possible.

[pmcjury]

Aren't most plugins just packages with not much config?

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 21, 2014, at 9:37 AM, Curtis Stewart notifications@github.com wrote:

How similar are the plugin installations? I think creating some type of LWRP or definition would be the best route, if possible.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[djoos]

From the New Relic documentation: "When developing a plugin, you can use New Relic's Java or Ruby SDK. You can also work directly with the Plugin API to write plugins in any language that has HTTP POST support. What you use depends on what you need to accomplish for you and for your plugin users."
So, it's probably no surprise plugins are quite varied in requirements/setup. Having said this: that doesn't really scare me, it's more the fact whether it makes sense to reinvent the wheel in this cookbook (several plugin creators have their own cookbooks, albeit not all of them are very user-friendly IMO) vs. having a centralized place and uniform way of using plugins when already using the New Relic-cookbook...

Hope this helps!

Kind regards,
David

[josegonzalez]

👍 lwrp.

[hhoover]

I'd prefer to keep cookbooks focused. This cookbook installs New Relic monitoring and the agent for your application. I think that's enough - plugin cookbooks should list this one as a dependency. Add a bunch of plugins to this cookbook and you have more to maintain and bloat for those that don't need/want additional plugins.

If you want to expand the scope of this cookbook to include plugins, then a LWRP is the way to go, but I wouldn't do it.

[ostap36]

Hello @djoos, first of all thank you for the cookbook, I haven't contributed but I'm an active user/consumer. Not to discourage expanding the scope for this cookbook, I just wanted to mention that there is a recently released cookbook by New Relic itself for plugins installation and config https://github.com/newrelic-platform/newrelic_plugins_chef, I've used it for pivotal plugins install and it worked quite well. I would echo @hhoover comment to keep cookbooks more narrow and tie them as constructive dependencies.

[djoos]

Thanks for the feedback guys...

@ostap36 yes, New Relic have released the newrelic_plugins community cookbook for their own plugins (F5, Rackspace Load Balancers, MySQL, etc.), but not any other plugins out there (eg. MeetMe, Railsware, SendGrid, etc.)...

I'm leaning towards the narrow approach suggested by @hhoover and @ostap36, which would mean phasing out the already implemented MeetMe-plugin in the short term.
In that way this cookbook would focus on the installation of the server monitoring and the agent monitoring and would leave writing cookbooks for plugin installation over to the actual plugin vendor(s), especially as a plugin can be bolted together quite flexibly so it would bring a lot of clutter to the newrelic-cookbook.

Please do keep those comments coming!

[bencaron]

👍

[et304383]

We use the meetme plugin, but had to comment out its use since it seems to fail on first try due to issues with python setup tools. A second run of the chef client works.

We since moved to using AWS ElasticCache so no longer need the meetme plugin for memcache monitoring. That being said, we might still use it in the future.

[djoos]

Hi guys,

thanks for your feedback!

The decision has been taken to deprecate the meetme-plugin from this cookbook and then to either join forces with any (active) newrelic-plugins cookbook out there or start a separate newrelic-plugins cookbook.

Whichever way it will end up going: this particular cookbook will keep its focus on installing and configuring the server and application monitoring.

Thanks for your help!
David