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How would you go about writing something similiar in nature to newrelic? i.e. something that monitors a live application.

Is it simply listening to traffic going over certain ports and logging it, or is it kernel level c/c++ code to do this?

Looking for an overview of what's involved, sounds like an interesting application to write.

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The basics of what New Relic does are fairly easy to get started with. But the deeper you go, the more complicated it gets. There's a reason New Relic employs a lot of developers and QA people.

For Ruby and Rails, you can read the source code of the agent (it's on github) that wraps your code. It will give you a good idea of what it's doing. Although the agent is pretty complex, there is even more complicated stuff going on in the server.

I can't really go into details, since I work at New Relic, but you will find a lot of technical details if you look around, since we've talked about it pretty openly in the past.

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so does it send data via http then to the server? –  codecompleting Nov 10 '11 at 17:03

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