Michael Haren’s Wassupy Blog

Notify New Relic of Deployments with Chef

in work, code, and technology

You can tell New Relic about your deployments and they’ll add vertical lines to the graphs at the corresponding times. This is super helpful as the (often dramatic) impact of a deployment becomes easy to grok.

The documentation on the Events > Deployments page is very helpful, but I still had to tinker with my message to New Relic’s API to get it to work. Here’s what I ended up with:

At the end of my recipe, post to the API with the http_request resource:

http_request "notify_new_relic" do
  action :post
  url "https://rpm.newrelic.com/deployments.xml"
  headers "x-api-key" => "#{node["newrelic"]["apikey"]}"
  message "application_id" => "#{node["newrelic"]["appid"]}"
end

I’m loading the key and application id from attributes. And it works

This was crazy simple to do, though it might be better implemented as a report handler. If you go that route please share.

1 comment

Unknown said on 2014-11-20

Thanks for this, but the “message” parameter no longer accepts a hash, and the New Relic API has changed to use the URL https://api.newrelic.com/deployments.xml and the format of the parameters has changed. So you need something like:

message "deployment[application_id]=#{app_id}&deployment[revision]=#{sha}"

(I parse the Git SHA out of release_path, I’m sure there’s a better way but Chef’s sparse documentation bit me again)

Anyway thanks for getting me most of the way there :)

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