Install newrelic-infra-agent with Homebrew, chocolatey

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• newrelic-infra
• newrelic-infra-ctl
• newrelic-infra-service

Project history

New Relic announced New Relic Infrastructure on November 7, 2016, with general availability scheduled for November 16, 2016. The launch pitch centered on dynamic infrastructure: cloud instances, Docker containers, changing host configuration, and the need to correlate configuration changes with health metrics. The open source agent repository is the implementation that makes that product useful on machines.

Adoption history

Adoption follows New Relic's commercial footprint more than a hobbyist CLI pattern. The agent is packaged for multiple operating systems and is documented for manual installs, containers, and larger fleet-management approaches. Companion configuration-management projects such as New Relic's Chef and Puppet tooling exist because the usual user is operating a fleet, not installing a one-off desktop utility.

Homebrew is a secondary distribution channel for this package, mostly useful for macOS hosts, test machines, and developers who want a bottled agent. Homebrew analytics reported 211 installs in 30 days, 560 in 90 days, and 2,576 in 365 days for the formula when queried on July 1, 2026.

How it is used

Package nerds install it when they need a real New Relic host entity: set a New Relic license key/profile configuration, run the service, and let the agent report CPU, memory, disk, process, inventory, container, and integration data. On developer machines it is also useful for checking agent behavior, config-file paths, and packaging changes before rolling the same version across Linux or Windows fleets.

The operational habit is to keep it updated: New Relic's release notes repeatedly tell users to upgrade regularly, and the agent has a fast cadence of dependency, integration, Fluent Bit/logging, security, and platform-support changes.

Why package nerds care

This is not a general-purpose monitoring daemon so much as a packaged endpoint for a vendor ecosystem. Its significance in av.db is that secrets and configuration are concentrated in predictable files such as newrelic-infra.yml, and the installed executables are service/control-plane tools rather than ad hoc user commands.

Timeline

• 2016-11-07: New Relic announced New Relic Infrastructure.
• 2016-11-16: New Relic Infrastructure general availability was scheduled at launch.
• 2026-07-01: Homebrew formula version observed as 1.77.1, with 2,576 formula installs over the preceding 365-day analytics window.

Related projects

• newrelic/infrastructure-agent-chef
• newrelic/infrastructure-agent-puppet
• newrelic/nri-docker
• New Relic Infrastructure Monitoring

Sources

• https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/infrastructure/choose-infra-install-method/
• https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/release-notes/infrastructure-release-notes/infrastructure-agent-release-notes/
• https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula/newrelic-infra-agent.json
• https://github.com/newrelic/infrastructure-agent
• https://newrelic.com/press-release/20161107-3