Hi folks. Today I’m proud to announce the open-sourcing of New Relic’s Elixir Agent!

Elixir has been in use by my team in production at New Relic for a few years now. We’ve leveraged it to build stable high throughput web services, and it’s more than lived up to its mission of building scalable and maintainable applications. Of course, as a monitoring company it’s been critical that we have visibility into our own systems. We’ve been running a “stealth” agent in our Elixir services from day 1.

New Relic has also seen a steady increase in Elixir adoption by our user base. We get tons of feature requests from our customers, and the demand for visibility into Elixir services has continued to grow.

Since it’s beginning, New Relic has been connected to the Open Source community, and we continue to invest more. Now we’re open-sourcing an agent for the first time! We believe that visibility into software systems is critical to its success - and we want to help the open-source world bake that into the very foundations.

So here we are, at the intersection of these 3 factors - Elixir’s growth, New Relic’s commitment to open-source, and the grass-roots use of Elixir inside New Relic.

Interested in getting started? As of today you can:

• Check out the code on Github
• Install the package from Hex
• Read the docs on HexDocs

The Agent implements a core set of features including Transaction Monitoring, Transaction Traces, Distributed Tracing, Error Traces and more. We even collect some key BEAM stats to see how the VM is performing. However, we don’t implement everything that our fully supported Agents like Java and Ruby do.

As an open-source project, we’re aiming to provide a stable and extensible foundation to provide observability into Elixir applications.

I’m excited about the future of this project and the future of Elixir!

Reach out to us here in the Forum, in newrelic on Elixir’s Slack, or through Issues & Pull Requests on Github.