• Log inStart now

Automate tagging of your entire stack

30 min

Organizing your services, hosts, and applications in New Relic can be challenging, especially as resources come and go. One strategy to overcome this challenge is to apply tags, consistently, across your stack.

In this guide, you:

  • Provision a host on AWS
  • Deploy a small Node.js app on that host
  • Instrument the host and the application with New Relic agents
  • Apply consistent tags across all your entities
  • Tear down everything you make when you're done

The next section introduces you to tools for performing tasks in this guide.

Before you begin

Throughout this guide, you use three open source projects to automatically set up, instrument, and tear down your infrastructure:

Each project is distinct, and encapsulates its own behavior. This maintains a separation of concerns and allows you to compose complex scenarios using a modular approach.

Collaborate with us

The Demo Deployer is currently in development. Because of our commitment to open source, we are working in the open early in the process and invite you to collaborate with us. Drop any thoughts and comments in the Build on New Relic support thread, and let us know what you think!

The last thing you need before you get started is to install Docker if you don't have it already.

Now that you have a high-level understanding of the tools you'll use, you can begin by pulling the Demo Deployer!

Step 1 of 6

Pull the deployer locally

Pull the deployer Docker image from our GitHub Container Registry:

bash
$
docker pull ghcr.io/newrelic/deployer:latest

Now, you have a local Docker image, named deployer, which you use throughout the rest of this guide.

Step 2 of 6

Configure your credentials

In this guide, you provision a host on AWS. The deployer uses a configuration file that contains your credentials for each service it communicates with so that it can invoke the necessary APIs.

You can follow the User Config documentation in the deployer repository to set up each account and create your configuration file. In the end, you'll have a JSON file that contains credentials for AWS, New Relic, and GitHub:

{
"credentials": {
"aws": {
"apiKey": "my_aws_api_key",
"secretKey": "my_aws_secret_key",
"secretKeyPath": "/path/to/my/secretkey.pem",
"region": "my_aws_region"
},
"newrelic": {
"licenseKey": "my_new_relic_license_key",
"accountId": "my_new_relic_account_id"
},
"git": {
"username": "my_git_access_token"
}
}
}

Name the credentials file creds.json, and store it—along with your [keypair filename].pem file—in a directory called $HOME/configs.

Step 3 of 6

Run the application

Now that everything is set up, you can run the deployer application in a Docker container:

bash
$
docker run -it\
>
-v $HOME/configs/:/mnt/deployer/configs/\
>
--entrypoint ruby ghcr.io/newrelic/deployer main.rb -c configs/creds.json -d https://raw.githubusercontent.com/newrelic/demo-catalog/main/catalog/hello/hello.aws.json

With this command, you're running the deployer Docker container with the following options:

  • -v mounts the $HOME/configs volume (where you stored your configuration files) at /mnt/deployer/configs/ in the container
  • --entrypoint sets the default command for Docker to ruby

Finally, you pass a list of arguments to the entrypoint, including:

  • -c configs/creds.json: The user credentials configuration file
  • -d https://raw.githubusercontent.com/newrelic/demo-catalog/main/catalog/hello/hello.aws.json: The deployment configuration file

Tip

You can specify the log level for the deployer using -l. info is the default, but you can also use debug or error. This is a helpful option to use when something goes wrong.

Once you run this command, the deployer will create and instrument some specific resources. This may take a few minutes. In the meantime, read on to learn more about what is actually happening during this process.

Locating the user configuration files

Notice, in the Docker command, that -c takes configs/creds.json. Also, you referenced your .pem file from configs/, as well.

This is because you mounted $HOME/configs to /mnt/deployer/configs/ and /mnt/deployer/ is the working directory, according to the deployer's Dockerfile. So, you can access your user configuration files at configs/, which is a relative path from your working directory.

Understanding the deployment configuration file

The deployment configuration file, hello.aws.json, which drives the deployer, contains four sections:

  • services
  • global_tags
  • resources
  • instrumentations

These sections describe the actions the deployer executes.

The first section is services:

{
"services": [
{
"id": "app1",
"display_name": "Hello-App1",
"source_repository": "-b main https://github.com/newrelic/demo-nodetron.git",
"deploy_script_path": "deploy/linux/roles",
"port": 5001,
"destinations": ["host1"],
"files": [
{
"destination_filepath": "engine/data/index.json",
"content": <some content>
}
]
}
]
}

services defines one service, app1, which lives on host1 at port 5001. It uses the Demo Nodetron you learned about earlier in this guide as its source.

Important

In this example, some HTML has been removed for clarity. To run the deployer, you need to use the real content in hello.json.

The second section is global_tags:

{
"global_tags": {
"dxOwningTeam": "DemoX",
"dxEnvironment": "development",
"dxDepartment": "Area51",
"dxProduct": "Hello"
}
}

global_tags defines tags for the deployer to apply to all the resources in your stack. These tags are an important part of organizing your New Relic entities.

The third section is resources:

{
"resources": [
{
"id": "host1",
"display_name": "Hello-Host1",
"provider": "aws",
"type": "ec2",
"size": "t3.micro"
}
]
}

resources defines one host, host1, which is a small EC2 instance on AWS. This host is referred to in the services section.

The fourth, and final, section is instrumentations:

{
"instrumentations": {
"resources": [
{
"id": "nr_infra",
"resource_ids": ["host1"],
"provider": "newrelic",
"source_repository": "-b main https://github.com/newrelic/demo-newrelic-instrumentation.git",
"deploy_script_path": "deploy/linux/roles",
"version": "1.12.1"
}
],
"services": [
{
"id": "nr_node_agent",
"service_ids": ["app1"],
"provider": "newrelic",
"source_repository": "-b main https://github.com/newrelic/demo-newrelic-instrumentation.git",
"deploy_script_path": "deploy/node/linux/roles",
"version": "6.11.0"
}
]
}
}

instrumentations configures, as the name implies, New Relic instrumentations for the host1 infrastructure and the app1 Node.js application. These definitions use the Demo New Relic Instrumentation project you learned about earlier.

Step 4 of 6

Generate some traffic

When deployer has run successfully, you will see a message that describes the resources deployed and services installed during the process:

bash
[INFO] Executing Deployment
[] Parsing and validating Deployment configuration success
[] Provisioner success
[] Installing On-Host instrumentation success
[] Installing Services and instrumentations success
[INFO] Deployment successful!
Deployed Resources:
host1 (aws/ec2):
ip: 52.90.86.109
services: ["app1"]
instrumentation:
nr_infra: newrelic v1.12.1
Installed Services:
app1:
url: http://52.90.86.109:5001
instrumentation:
nr_node_agent: newrelic v6.11.0
Completed at 2020-08-20 15:11:14 +0000

Visit your application by navigating to the app1 url in your browser:

Hello World Web Site

From there, you can follow the instructions to send traffic to New Relic.

Important

Your app1 url will be different than the url shown in this guide.

Step 5 of 6

Check your tags

After you've generated some traffic to your Node.js application, use the New Relic search redirect to find the resources you deployed:

Search Redirect

Once you have found your resources, select the service you deployed, Hello-App1.

Then, click on the 'tags' button next to the name, which opens the tags widget:

Metadata and Tags

Notice that all the tags in the global_tags section of the deployment configuration show up under Tags:

Search Redirect

If you open the tags widget for the host, you'll also see the global_tags.

Step 6 of 6

Tear down your resources

Because you've provisioned resources in your cloud account, you need to decommission them. You can do this with the deployer.

Add the teardown flag, -t, to the end of your command:

bash
$
docker run -it\
>
-v $HOME/configs/:/mnt/deployer/configs/\
>
--entrypoint ruby ghcr.io/newrelic/deployer main.rb -c configs/creds.json -d https://raw.githubusercontent.com/newrelic/demo-catalog/main/catalog/hello/hello.aws.json -t

When the deployer has finished successfully, you'll see output that is similar to what you saw during deployment:

bash
[INFO] Executing Teardown
[] Parsing and validating Teardown configuration success
[] Provisioner success
[] Uninstalling On-Host instrumentation success
[] Uninstalling Services and instrumentations success
[] Terminating infrastructure success
[INFO] Teardown successful!

Next steps

Congratulations! Throughout this guide, you used the Demo Deployer to provision and instrument a host and application in AWS and automatically configured those entities with a list of tags.

Next, try creating your own deployment configuration and change the global tags! One cool thing you can do is pass in a configuration file URL to the deployer.

Here's one that uses a gist on GitHub:

bash
$
docker run -it\
>
-v $HOME/configs/:/mnt/deployer/configs/\
>
--entrypoint ruby ghcr.io/newrelic/deployer main.rb -c configs/creds.json -d https://gist.githubusercontent.com/markweitzel/d281fde8ca572ced6346dc25470790a5/raw/373166eb50929a0dd23ba5136abf2fa5caf3d369/MarksHelloDemoConfig.json
Copyright © 2024 New Relic Inc.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.