Collector for host monitoring | New Relic Documentation

You can collect metrics about your infrastructure hosts with OpenTelemetry if you set up the host receiver in a collector. The collector is a component of OpenTelemetry that collects, processes, and exports telemetry data to New Relic (or any observability back-end).

If you're looking for help with other collector use cases, see the newrelic-opentelemetry-examples repository.

Step 1: Prerequisites

Make sure you've completed the following before going further:

If you haven't already done so, sign up for a free New Relic account.
Get the license key for the New Relic account to which you want to report data.

Step 2: Install the OpenTelemetry collector

To do a basic installation for single hosts in the cloud or on-premises, see OpenTelemetry's instructions for up-to-date installation steps from the community. Instructions are available for the following:

Linux: Debian systems
Linux: Red Hat
Windows
Docker, Kubernetes, and other options

Your deployment experience might vary depending on which vendor-specific distributions you use. For example, installation via a package manager might be available for Linux hosts.

Important

To set up infrastructure monitoring, you need to install and configure components that are included in the collector-contrib release. For example, the host receiver is required to collect basic host metrics such as CPU, memory, disk, and network stats and is only available in the OpenTelemetry collector-contrib release.

Step 3: Configure host monitoring using the host receiver

This collector example is meant to serve as a starting point from which you can extend, customize, and validate configurations before using them in production.

The collector-contrib release provides a hostreceiver that generates metrics about the system scraped from various sources. Deploy the collector as an agent when you use a hostreceiver.

When using the host receiver as part of the collector configuration, New Relic automatically detects host metrics as part of a Host entity and will synthesize its golden metrics providing the same experience as with the New Relic infrastructure agent. The following are the configuration requirements to enable the Host entity experience in New Relic UI:

host.id attribute is present in host metrics.
service.name and container.id attributes are not present in host metrics.

Learn more about available metrics and advanced configurations from the OpenTelemetry documentation in GitHub.

Adapt the config.yaml with these recommended parameters:

Important

CPU, load, memory, and disk utilization metrics require otelcol-contrib release v0.47.0 or greater.

Configuration	Description
`receivers::hostmetrics`	Enable host metrics. A 20 second interval is recommended (same default as the Infrastructure agent). It should not be greater than 60 seconds to avoid issues with “host not responding” alerts. Process instrumentation is optional.
`processors::resourcedetection`	Keep the following in mind: `env`: Reads resource information from the `OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES` environment variable. `system`: Adds `host.name` and `os.type`. For cloud environments, configure a specific resource detection processor so that metrics are decorated with `host.id` (required to identify the host entity in New Relic). Common cloud detectors are `gce` for GCP machines, `ec2` for AWS EC2, and `azure` for Azure VMs. Additional processors are available for orchestrated environments. For on-premises systems (or unsupported cloud environments), a `host.id` attribute is required. Use the `resource` processor to copy the `host.name` value (from `system`) as a new `host.id` attribute. Note this value should be unique across all instrumented hosts: `resource: attributes: - key: host.id from_attribute: host.name action: upsert`
`processors::batch`	The batch processor accepts spans, metrics, or logs and places them into batches. Batching helps better compress the data and reduce the number of outgoing connections required to transmit the data. This processor supports both size and time based batching.
`processors::memory_limiter`	The memory limiter processor is used to prevent out of memory situations on the collector. Putting checks in place is important because: The amount and type of data the collector processes is specific to its environment. The collector's resource utilization is dependent on the configured processors.
`processors::cumulative_delta`	The cumulative delta processor converts cumulative sum metrics to cumulative delta. This helps you query system metric rates more easily in New Relic.
`service::pipelines::metrics`	Make sure `hostreceiver` and `resourcedetection` are included.

Here is a sample configuration YAML file. Be sure to do the following:

Replace OTLP_ENDPOINT_HERE with the appropriate endpoint.
Replace YOUR_KEY_HERE with your account's license key.

extensions:
  health_check:

receivers:
  hostmetrics:
    collection_interval: 20s
    scrapers:
      cpu:
        metrics:
          system.cpu.utilization:
            enabled: true
      load:
      memory:
        metrics:
          system.memory.utilization:
            enabled: true
      disk:
      filesystem:
        metrics:
          system.filesystem.utilization:
            enabled: true
      network:
      paging:
        metrics:
          system.paging.utilization:
            enabled: true
      processes:
      process:

processors:
  memory_limiter:
    check_interval: 1s
    limit_mib: 1000
    spike_limit_mib: 200
  batch:
  cumulativetodelta:
    metrics:
      - system.network.io
      - system.disk.operations
      - system.network.dropped
      - system.network.packets
      - process.cpu.time
  resource:
    attributes:
      - key: host.id
        from_attribute: host.name
        action: upsert
  resourcedetection:
    detectors: [env, system]

exporters:
  otlp:
    endpoint: OTLP_ENDPOINT_HERE
    headers:
      api-key: YOUR_KEY_HERE

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [hostmetrics]
      processors: [batch, resourcedetection, resource, cumulativetodelta]
      exporters: [otlp]

  extensions: [health_check]

Step 4: View your data

You can view your collector data in a variety of places in the New Relic UI.

Browse host data in infrastructure UI

By using the recommended configuration for the host receiver, you can view data through the standard features in the Infrastructure UI (New Host UI) experience.

Query host metrics

Once metrics are successfully ingested in New Relic, they are available in the data explorer and query builder.

The following NRQL queries show examples to help you explore the metrics you received:

Listing number of metric updates ingested by metric name

SELECT count(*) FROM Metric WHERE metricName LIKE 'system.%' FACET metricName LIMIT max

Querying specific metrics faceted by host

SELECT average(system.disk.operations) FROM Metric FACET host.name TIMESERIES

Listing dimensions available for a given metric

SELECT keyset() FROM Metric WHERE metricName = 'system.disk.operations'

Learn more about querying the metric data type.

What's next?

After you set up your collector, check out our best practices guide for tips to improve your use of OpenTelemetry and New Relic.