When using custom counters all metrics start with Component/

[thelukemccarthy]

Hi

I have set up the perfmon plugin to use custom counters and the data is going into New Relic. I'm collecting 59 counters are collected from 6 servers.

The problem is when I create a new graph for the counters all of the counters start with Component/ and many are missing. Is there a way to get the full counter name including the server name?

[coopr]

@thelukemccarthy where and how are you creating "a new graph for the counters"? Can you post the URL of your graph? And/or a screenshot? Thanks!

[thelukemccarthy]

To create a new graph I do the following

• Click on the plugin name of the left hand menu, I named it Testrig
• Click on the link of the server name
• Click on "+ Add chart or table"
• Then I start filling in the details, see the screen shot below.

When selected a metric everything starts with "Component/"

[coopr]

Ah, so you are using a forked version of this plugin agent? (eg. you changed the GUID of the plugin agent?)

All this looks normal to me.

You won't see the server name in the metric name - because the metrics are per-server. Thus, you'll build up your dashboard, then save it, and then when you click on a particular server name in the "plugin index" view, it'll take you to your saved dashboard that displays metrics for that particular server.

All plugin metric names always start with Component/

Sorry, I have no idea why only some metrics are being populated.

[thelukemccarthy]

Oh OK.

I haven't looked at the code but I assume the server name isn't stored with the metric? So I would guess that when gathering the same metrics from different servers, for example

    \\\\xxx.xxx.xxx.21\Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time  
    \\\\xxx.xxx.xxx.42\Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time

they're overwritten and only one ends being stored. This would explain most of the missing metrics.

Does that mean that I need to run the Perfmon plugin on each server and create a dashboard for each server?

[coopr]

• In general, when gathering the same metrics from different servers, you'd not include the server name in the name of the metric - instead you'd specify it in the "name" field, as in this example https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/plugin-dev/metric-data-for-the-plugin-api#examples (There are, however, some cases where you would want to include the server name as part of the metric name - if you did so, you'd typically put the server name at the END of the metric name, not at the beginning)
• From reading https://github.com/nickfloyd/newrelic-perfmon-plugin/blob/master/config/template_newrelic_plugin.yml I can see that this plugin's agent can be configured to collect metrics from multiple servers - so no, you don not need to run the plugin agent on each server from which you want to collect metrics - you need to run it on only one server, and configure it to collect metrics from the other servers.
• No, you don't need to "create a dashboard" for each server - you create a plugin dashboard, and then each server automagically creates and populates a new instance of that dashboard that is specific to that server.

I encourage you to carefully follow the provided instructions in the README and the .yml config file - I think all your questions are answered there already!