Iron.io Announces Agent Processing for Powering New Relic Plugins

Today Iron.io announces powerful agent processing capabilities for powering third-party plugins for the New Relic Platform. New Relic has opened up its SaaS service to provide building blocks for creating monitoring capabilities for any technology or service. Performance metrics from IT components and cloud services can now be brought directly into New Relic and viewed alongside existing metrics and graphs.

The New Relic Platform

Many third-party IT components can power their own uploading to the New Relic Platform. Plugins for cloud services, however, will need outside processing capabilities to move data from these third party services to the New Relic Platform.

Iron.io provides a simple and flexible scheduling and processing capablity that can be used power third-party plugins – all without having to create application or setup or manage servers. Iron.io already powers plugins from top service companies such as Twilio, Airbrake, Stripe, Parse, and Desk and can extend this to any cloud service or API-enabled metric provider. (Plugins for Iron.io's own IronMQ and IronWorker services are also powered by Iron.io agents.)

A Library of New Relic Plugins – Powered by Iron.io

Users of these third-party services can choose from a library of Iron.io-powered plugins or create new ones and use a simple dashboard to run and operate the plugins. The Iron.io platform performs the continual API extraction, transformation, and loading of metrics from third party APIs to New Relic.

Starting an Airbrake Agent in Iron.io

The Iron.io platform eliminates the complexity associated with operating a plugin and provides a simple and immediate way to benefit from New Relic’s new open performance monitoring platform.

Using Iron.io to upload Airbrake metrics into the New Relic Platform is a big win for us. Our users gain because they can get the Airbrake plugin running with very little effort. Our engineering team benefits because we don’t have to do anything to move and transform data on behalf of our thousands of users. Iron.io handles all of this effortlessly and will automatically scale to handle the workload. 
– Ben Arent, Product Development, Airbrake

How the New Relic Platform and Plugins Work

Here’s how the New Relic Platform works and the benefits it provides:

Community members create New Relic Plugins that collect monitoring data from their technologies of choice and transfer that data to New Relic’s SaaS platform for processing, analysis, and persistent storage. Plugin data is presented to end-users through New Relic’s data visualizations and web-based user interface.

Plugins can be published and shared with New Relic end-users or be kept private. End-users can install and use any published Plugin (or build their own) for free to add visibility into any technology component. Plugins complement New Relic’s native application performance monitoring capabilities by providing visibility into other technology components (such as databases, message queues, caching servers, routers, and others) that support applications. The New Relic Platform provides a single, unified platform and a consistent user interface for monitoring the entire application stack.

IronWorker Agents Power New Relic Plugins

The Iron.io agent platform uses the IronWorker service to perform the API extraction and data tranformation. IronWorker is a highly scalable task queue / worker service that provides scheduling and async / scale-out processing. It is ideally suited to provide the continual processing capabilities needed to power New Relic plugins for cloud and API-driven services.

Iron.io agents extract metric data and then upload to the New Relic Platform

Developers and service users can use existing IronWorker agents – such as ones built for top services such as Airbrake, Twilio, Stripe, Desk, and Parse – or create new ones from the large and growing list of developer services. An IronWorker agents will automatically grab data from third party service APIs for a user’s account, transform it, and then populate New Relic, thereby giving users a consolidated views of their data within New Relic.

 The New Relic Platform is an open community-powered platform for application performance monitoring. Using Iron.io as a processing engine to power service plugins is a perfect combination and is a huge accelerator for our service partners and for our platform users.
– Cooper Marcus, Business Development, New Relic

Iron.io Agents Run on a Continual Basis

All service metric extraction, processing, and uploading to New Relic can be done with no application setup, no servers, and no maintenance. The Plugin agents run on the Iron.io platform operating in a high availablity environment and can scale out as needed on top of industrial strength cloud infrastructure. Plugins can be kept in any code repository and can be written in any of the top programming languages. (Iron.io supports PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, Node.js, Java, and Go, among others.)

Users benefit by gaining immediate access to their metrics within the New Relic Platform. The library of plugins that Iron.io has created for top third-party services can be used simply by entering New Relic and third-party service credentials into a dashboard. Once entered, an agent will be created and uploaded to the Iron.io platform, and will then start loading service metrics into New Relic on a continual real-time basis.

Third-party services benefit by speeding up the development of plugins and eliminating any setup, deployment, or infrastructure involved with powering plugins. API services will also gain instant and immediate scale – sufficient to handle the thousands of users that will want to take advantage of New Relic’s monitoring capabilities.

A Sampling of Iron.io Agents for the New Relic Platform

A Leap Forward in Performance Monitoring

The New Relic Platform is a big step forward in application performance monitoring. Uploading metrics from third party components and services into New Relic means that all application-critical information can be on hand in a single location. Developers win because they get increased simplicity and availability of data which translates into easier and faster ways to manage and scale applications.

Cloud and API-driven services, however, need some help when it comes to getting data into the New Relic Platform. Iron.io agent processing – running on continual basis – fills this need in a simple, scalable, and reliable way.

Using Iron.io agents to power New Relic service plugins makes a ton of sense. Many of New Relic’s 50,000+ customers will be taking advantage of this new platform to have greater visibility of their application performance. Iron.io is the only platform that has the strength and scalability to handle the processing involved in transforming and uploading data on a continual basis.
– Chad Arimura, CEO/Founder, Iron.io

Powering Other New Relic Plugins

To inquire about powering other service plugins, please contact us on our support channel or connect with us in our public chat room.

Support:  support @ iron.io
Live Chat: get.iron.io/chat

To get started with Iron.io and message queuing and task processing, sign up for a free Iron.io account now at ironio.staging.wpengine.com

Resources

To take advantage of the special offer for Iron.io users for New Relic Standard (free, forever instead of the normal price of $49/month/host), go to the New Relic site.

New Relic Standard (Special Offer)

To get the Airbrake Agent and the other Iron.io-powered plugins, head to the New Relic site (as well as click on the plugins tab in their dashboard).

Airbrake Agent on New Relic 

 

To view the code for the Airbrake plugin, visit the repo on Githbub.

Airbrake Plugin on GitHub 

 

To create and power your own plugins, clone or fork this rep, upload it to IronWorker, and then schedule it to run on a continual basis.

New Relic API Wrapper on GitHub