An example of manually instrumenting a background task, without using the newrelic-admin wrapper script.

task.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import newrelic.agent

# Initialize the New Relic agent as early as possible.

config_file = os.environ.get('NEW_RELIC_CONFIG_FILE')
newrelic.agent.initialize(config_file)

# Import modules after agent initialization, so that they
# get instrumented.

import requests

def get_content(url):
    response = requests.get(url)
    return response.content

# Decorate the function you want to monitor. Since this is not a
# web transaction, it should be monitored as a background task.

@newrelic.agent.background_task()
def task():
    print len(get_content('http://newrelic.com'))
    print len(get_content('https://www.google.com'))
    print len(get_content('https://github.com'))

if __name__ == '__main__':

    # Force registration, so that data from the first
    # transaction is captured.

    newrelic.agent.register_application(timeout=10.0)

    task()