Overview

Several third-party tools are available to manage and display the metrics produced by Kill Bill. One popular tool is New Relic. This package offers a low-cost option to monitor and display whatever metrics you may find useful from the Kill Bill collection, including metrics that show the performance and resource use of Kill Bill and Kaui themselves, and metrics describing the infrastructure on which these systems run.

New Relic can be integrated with several types of Kill Bill installations. In this guide we discuss the use of New Relic to manage metrics produced by single-tier and multi-tier implementations on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The latest Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Kill Bill is preconfigured to direct the Kill Bill metrics to New Relic and work with them in the way that best suits your needs. These instructions apply to the Kill Bill AMI version 2021.9 or later.

To set up New Relic to manage the metrics available from Kill Bill, there are just two steps:

  1. Setup a New Relic account

  2. Edit a configuration file to enable the transfer of the complete Kill Bill metrics.

Set Up New Relic

You may already be familiar with New Relic. If not, this section will explain how to get started.

First, go to the New Relic website. New Relic offers a free account as long as your usage does not exceed certain limits. Provide a name and email address to sign up.

You should see the New Relic main page. To get back to this page at a future time you can click the words New Relic One in the upper left corner.

Set Up the Authorization

To authorize the sending of the Kill Bill metrics, it is necessary to edit two lines in this file:

/var/lib/tomcat/bin/setenv2.sh

This file contains configuration information for tomcat, which manages the KillBill web applications.

This is a small file. The two lines to be edited are:

-Dcom.killbill.newrelic.enable=false
-Dcom.killbill.newrelic.apiKey=

These should be changed to:

-Dcom.killbill.newrelic.enable=true
-Dcom.killbill.newrelic.apiKey=Your-API-Key

New Relic provides several types of keys. The API key to be added is called the Insights Insert Key. To find the Insights Insert Key:

  1. Close any overlay panes on the New Relic page by clicking on the X in the upper right corner.

  2. Click the symbol at the far upper right to open your account menu, then select API keys.

  3. On the page that appears, select Insights Insert keys at the lower right.

  4. In the Insert Keys column on the left, under the word key at the bottom, click Show.

  5. Manually copy the key to your clipboard, then paste it to the configuration file.

After editing the file, go to your AWS EC2 dashboard and reboot the instance so the new configuration file will be read. If you have more than one instance, follow the same procedure for each one.

Test the Installation

To test your installation, follow these simple steps:

  1. Go to the New Relic main page

  2. Select Browse Data from the top menu

  3. Select Metrics from the dropdown

After a short delay, you should see a long list of metrics; well over 1,000 in your list.

Congratulations. Your New Relic integration is complete!

Using New Relic

The New Relic site has lots of documentation, so we won’t repeat any of that here. We will just suggest a few quick steps to get started:

  1. Close any overlay panes on the New Relic page by clicking on the X in the upper right corner.

  2. Select Browse Data in the menu and Metrics in the submenu. A list of available metrics will appear on the left.

  3. Select some metrics to see the graph (chart) they produce. Identify the ones you would like to see together in a dashboard.

  4. To create a dashboard, close the metrics page, select Dashboards in the menu, and click + Create a Dashboard.

  5. Select Create New Dashboard, give it a name, and click Create.

You can add charts to your dashboard for any metrics you choose. The charts can be edited, deleted, and rearranged. Your dashboard will appear under the Dashboards menu item. Have fun and good luck!