Monitor AWS Bottlerocket with New Relic

Bottlerocket is a new Linux-based OS by AWS that has been specifically built to run containers.

In particular, it has been designed to lower operational costs and management complexity. Bottlerocket does this by reducing its footprint around what’s needed to run containers while improving security with automatic OS updates. Bottlerocket is also open source and can optimize performance for Amazon EC2 and services for container orchestration and registries.

After a few months in public preview, Bottlerocket and New Relic’s support for it are now available. New Relic gives you full visibility into your workloads and infrastructure running on Bottlerocket, including Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS. In this post, we’ll show you how you can launch Bottlerocket for these services with New Relic.

Get Up and Running with New Relic on Bottlerocket

First, you need to obtain your license key, as described in our documentation.

How to monitor EC2 instances

To monitor an EC2 instance using Bottlerocket, just run our containerized agent using the required run flags:

docker run \

   -d \

   --name newrelic-infra \

   --network=host \

   --cap-add=SYS_PTRACE \

   -v "/:/host:ro" \

   -v "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock" \

   -e NRIA_LICENSE_KEY=YOUR_LICENSE_KEY \

   newrelic/infrastructure:latest

We also recommend that you configure our EC2 integration. This will help you get your EC2 instance metrics captured by the agent and enriched with AWS metadata, such as the region or the custom tags you have defined on the AWS console.

To check the performance and health of your EC2 instance, go to the Infrastructure tab.

How to monitor EKS

To monitor an EKS cluster with EC2 nodes running Bottlerocket, deploy our Kubernetes integration by running the installer (use this link if your account is in the EU region).

After configuring the different options, select your installation method, manifest file or Helm, and follow the instructions. For example, if you use the manifest file, you’ll be asked to download it and then run a kubectl command to deploy the integration:

Finally, click on “Listen for data.” Once the data is received, you will be able to explore your data, which will take you to the Kubernetes cluster explorer. There, you can correlate infrastructure and application metrics, events, logs, and traces.

How to monitor ECS

To monitor an ECS cluster with EC2 nodes running Bottlerocket, deploy our on-host ECS integration CloudFormation stack, which will deploy our containerized agent across all your ECS nodes. We offer other installation options in our documentation.

We also recommend that you configure our cloud ECS integration that will collect metrics and metadata directly from Amazon CloudWatch and service APIs.

Once the configuration is complete, your ECS cluster will show up in the Entity explorer. Or, you can also directly search and click on it. When you do that, you will get access to a dashboard showing key metrics for your cluster.

Get full visibility into your AWS infrastructure using Bottlerocket today for free

New Relic provides deep visibility into your containerized applications and AWS infrastructure. With our support for Bottlerocket, you can benefit from the new OS from AWS on your EC2 instances, EKS, and ECS clusters. And you’ll be confident in hitting your SLOs by receiving notifications when there is an issue. Plus, you’ll also have access to complete telemetry to troubleshoot and resolve the problem.

If you are already a New Relic customer, go ahead and install our agent to monitor your systems based on Bottlerocket. Otherwise, sign up now for a perpetual free account—including 100GB/month of data ingest, one full access user, and unlimited basic users.