New Relic Go Agent

The New Relic Go Agent allows you to monitor your Go applications with New Relic. It helps you track transactions, outbound requests, database calls, and other parts of your Go application's behavior and provides a running overview of garbage collection, goroutine activity, and memory use.

Go is a compiled language, and doesn’t use a virtual machine. This means that setting up New Relic for your Golang app requires you to use our Go agent API and manually add New Relic methods to your source code. Our API provides exceptional flexibility and control over what gets instrumented.

Installation

Compatibility and Requirements

For the latest version of the agent, Go 1.18+ is required.

Linux, OS X, and Windows (Vista, Server 2008 and later) are supported.

Installing and using the Go agent

To install the agent, follow the instructions in our GETTING_STARTED document or our GUIDE.

We recommend instrumenting your Go code to get the maximum benefits from the New Relic Go agent. But we make it easy to get great data in couple of ways:

• Even without adding instrumentation, just importing the agent and creating an application will provide useful runtime information about your number of goroutines, garbage collection statistics, and memory and CPU usage.
• You can use our many INTEGRATION packages for out-of-the box support for many popular Go web frameworks and libraries. We continue to add integration packages based on your feedback. You can weigh in on potential integrations by opening an Issue here in our New Relic Go agent GitHub project.

Upgrading

If you have already been using version 2.X of the agent and are upgrading to version 3.0, see our MIGRATION guide for details.

Getting Started

v3/examples/server/main.go is an example that will appear as "Example App" in your New Relic applications list. To run it:

env NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY=__YOUR_NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY__LICENSE__ \
    go run v3/examples/server/main.go

Some endpoints exposed are https://localhost:8000/ and https://localhost:8000/notice_error

Usage

Integration Packages

The following integration packages extend the base newrelic package to support the following frameworks and libraries. Frameworks and databases which don't have an integration package may still be instrumented using the newrelic package primitives.

Service Frameworks

Project	Integration Package
gin-gonic/gin	v3/integrations/nrgin	Instrument inbound requests through the Gin framework
gorilla/mux	v3/integrations/nrgorilla	Instrument inbound requests through the Gorilla framework
google.golang.org/grpc	v3/integrations/nrgrpc	Instrument gRPC servers and clients
labstack/echo	v3/integrations/nrecho-v3	Instrument inbound requests through version 3 of the Echo framework
labstack/echo	v3/integrations/nrecho-v4	Instrument inbound requests through version 4 of the Echo framework
julienschmidt/httprouter	v3/integrations/nrhttprouter	Instrument inbound requests through the HttpRouter framework
micro/go-micro	v3/integrations/nrmicro	Instrument servers, clients, publishers, and subscribers through the Micro framework

Datastores

More information about instrumenting databases without an integration package using newrelic package primitives can be found here.

Project	Integration Package
lib/pq	v3/integrations/nrpq	Instrument PostgreSQL driver (pq driver for database/sql)
jackc/pgx	v3/integrations/nrpgx	Instrument PostgreSQL driver (pgx driver for database/sql)
jackc/pgx/v5	v3/integrations/nrpgx5	Instrument PostgreSQL driver (pgx/v5 driver for database/sql)
go-mssqldb	v3/integrations/nrmssql	Instrument MS SQL driver
go-sql-driver/mysql	v3/integrations/nrmysql	Instrument MySQL driver
elastic/go-elasticsearch	v3/integrations/nrelasticsearch-v7	Instrument Elasticsearch datastore calls
database/sql	Use a supported database driver or builtin instrumentation	Instrument database calls with SQL
jmoiron/sqlx	Use a supported database driver or builtin instrumentation	Instrument database calls with SQLx
go-redis/redis	v3/integrations/nrredis-v7	Instrument Redis 7 calls
go-redis/redis	v3/integrations/nrredis-v8	Instrument Redis 8 calls
redis/go-redis	v3/integrations/nrredis-v9	Instrument Redis 9 calls
mattn/go-sqlite3	v3/integrations/nrsqlite3	Instrument SQLite driver
snowflakedb/gosnowflake	v3/integrations/nrsnowflake	Instrument Snowflake driver
mongodb/mongo-go-driver	v3/integrations/nrmongo	Instrument MongoDB calls

AI

Project	Integration Package
sashabaranov/go-openai	v3/integrations/nropenai	Send AI Monitoring Events with OpenAI
aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/tree/main/service/bedrockruntime	v3/integrations/nrawsbedrock	Send AI Monitoring Events with AWS Bedrock

Agent Logging

Project	Integration Package
sirupsen/logrus	v3/integrations/nrlogrus	Send agent log messages to Logrus
mgutz/logxi	v3/integrations/nrlogxi	Send agent log messages to Logxi
uber-go/zap	v3/integrations/nrzap	Send agent log messages to Zap

Logs in Context

Project	Integration Package
sirupsen/logrus	v3/integrations/logcontext-v2/nrlogrus	Send data collected from Logrus log messages to New Relic
log	v3/integrations/logcontext-v2/logWriter	Send data collected from the standard library logger log messages to New Relic
rs/zerolog	v3/integrations/logcontext-v2/zerologWriter	Send data collected from zerolog log messages to New Relic

AWS

Project	Integration Package
aws/aws-sdk-go	v3/integrations/nrawssdk-v1	Instrument outbound calls made using Go AWS SDK
aws/aws-sdk-go-v2	v3/integrations/nrawssdk-v2	Instrument outbound calls made using Go AWS SDK v2
aws/aws-lambda-go	v3/integrations/nrlambda	Instrument AWS Lambda applications

GraphQL

Project	Integration Package
graph-gophers/graphql-go	v3/integrations/nrgraphgophers	Instrument inbound requests using graph-gophers/graphql-go
graphql-go/graphql	v3/integrations/nrgraphqlgo	Instrument inbound requests using graphql-go/graphql

Misc

Project	Integration Package
pkg/errors	v3/integrations/nrpkgerrors	Wrap pkg/errors errors to improve stack traces and error class information
openzipkin/b3-propagation	v3/integrations/nrb3	Add B3 headers to outgoing requests
nats-io/nats.go	v3/integrations/nrnats	Instrument publishers and subscribers using the NATS client
nats-io/stan.go	v3/integrations/nrstan	Instrument publishers and subscribers using the NATS streaming client

These integration packages must be imported along with the newrelic package, as shown in this nrgin example.

Alternatives

If you are already using another open source solution to gather telemetry data, you may find it easier to use one of our open source exporters to send this data to New Relic:

• OpenTelemetry: github.com/newrelic/opentelemetry-exporter-go
• OpenCensus: github.com/newrelic/newrelic-opencensus-exporter-go
• Prometheus Exporter: github.com/newrelic/nri-prometheus
• Istio Adapter: github.com/newrelic/newrelic-istio-adapter
• Telemetry SDK: github.com/newrelic/newrelic-telemetry-sdk-go

Support

Should you need assistance with New Relic products, you are in good hands with several support channels.

If the issue has been confirmed as a bug or is a Feature request, please file a Github issue.

• Go Agent GUIDE: Step by step how-to for key agent features
• New Relic Documentation: Comprehensive guidance for using our platform
• Troubleshooting framework: Steps you through common troubleshooting questions
• New Relic Community: The best place to engage in troubleshooting questions
• New Relic Developer: Resources for building a custom observability applications
• New Relic University: A range of online training for New Relic users of every level

Privacy

At New Relic we take your privacy and the security of your information seriously, and are committed to protecting your information. We must emphasize the importance of not sharing personal data in public forums, and ask all users to scrub logs and diagnostic information for sensitive information, whether personal, proprietary, or otherwise.

We define "Personal Data" as any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual, including, for example, your name, phone number, post code or zip code, Device ID, IP address and email address.

For more information, review New Relic’s General Data Privacy Notice.

Contribute

We encourage your contributions to improve the Go Agent! Keep in mind when you submit your pull request, you'll need to sign the CLA via the click-through using CLA-Assistant. You only have to sign the CLA one time per project.

If you have any questions, or to execute our corporate CLA, required if your contribution is on behalf of a company, please drop us an email at opensource@newrelic.com.

A note about vulnerabilities

As noted in our security policy, New Relic is committed to the privacy and security of our customers and their data. We believe that providing coordinated disclosure by security researchers and engaging with the security community are important means to achieve our security goals.

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability in this project or any of New Relic's products or websites, we welcome and greatly appreciate you reporting it to New Relic through HackerOne.

If you would like to contribute to this project, please review these guidelines.

To all contributors, we thank you! Without your contribution, this project would not be what it is today. We also host a community project page dedicated to the Go Agent.

License

The New Relic Go agent is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.