Smart NewRelic Transaction Naming for Lift

Have you ever wanted to join the ranks of those who use the premium service called NewRelic for keeping tabs on your application? That's great! But wait! you're using Lift and Scala. Which isn't supported by NewRelic by default. But now YOU, yes, YOU can enjoy the benefits of monitoring your Lift app from NewRelic with the brand spanking new lean über web 3.0 Lift add-on from MATT FARMER ENTERPRISES.

If you want to be among the lucky individuals who are able to monitor their Lift apps with NewRelic, all you have to do is follow these simple steps.

First, add the following line to your library dependencies:

"me.frmr.newrelic"%%"lift-newrelic"%"1.0.0"

Then, add the following line somewhere in your Lift Apps Boot.scala:

NewRelicTransactionNaming.setup

Then just start up your JVM with the javaagent flag, as outlined inNewRelic's own documentation. And then YOU will be among the great, the few, who monitor their Lift apps with NewRelic and actually understand what URLs are consuming time.

How does it work?

This add-on relies on SiteMap, so if you're not using SiteMap in your Lift app, you should be. When a new request comes in, the NewRelicTransactionNaming code finds the Loc instance that matches the request, and sets the transaction name to that value. So, if a Loc is associated with the URL /amnesia you'll see /amnesia in your NewRelic transactions. If the Loc is parameterized, and is associated with something like /resource/*/edit you'll see /resource/star/edit for that transaction in your NewRelic Web Transactions list.

For now, APIs using RestHelper will need to manually set their transaction name, since there's no good way to do that auto-magically yet.

About Me

My name is Matt Farmer. By day, I ship code at Elemica. By night, I work onAnchor Tab, and making the world a better place for all.