What is New Relic and Use Cases of New Relic?

In the world of software development, user experience is everything. In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive digital world, businesses cannot afford to have applications that are slow or prone to errors. As applications and services become more complex with microservices, cloud-native technologies, and distributed systems, monitoring and troubleshooting become more challenging. To keep applications performing optimally and ensure a seamless user experience, companies need tools that provide detailed visibility into their applications, infrastructure, and services. This is where New Relic comes in.

New Relic is a leading Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool that helps businesses monitor and optimize the performance of their applications in real-time. It offers deep insights into how applications are performing, how users are interacting with them, and how system components are behaving. This comprehensive visibility allows organizations to quickly identify and fix performance issues before they escalate, helping businesses deliver high-quality user experiences while optimizing resource usage and operational costs.

In this blog, we will explore what New Relic is, its top use cases, key features, how it works and its architecture, the installation process, and how to get started with this powerful monitoring platform.

What is New Relic?

New Relic is a cloud-based Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform that helps organizations monitor and analyze the performance of their applications, infrastructure, and end-user experiences. It is designed to provide detailed insights into every aspect of the application stack, from the front-end user interface to the back-end database and infrastructure.

At its core, New Relic collects telemetry data from applications, servers, and user interactions and provides actionable insights that help organizations improve application performance. It uses real-time monitoring and advanced analytics to help teams troubleshoot problems faster, optimize resources, and improve overall user experience. Whether you are working with monolithic applications, microservices, or cloud-native architectures, New Relic offers full-stack observability.

New Relic is designed to support a wide range of programming languages, including Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and more. It is also highly adaptable, integrating with cloud services such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes, allowing businesses to gain visibility into complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Top 10 Use Cases of New Relic:

1. Application Performance Monitoring (APM): One of the core functions of New Relic is application performance monitoring. It helps organizations track key performance metrics such as response times, error rates, throughput, and transaction durations in real-time. New Relic’s APM feature allows businesses to monitor the health of their applications, spot bottlenecks, and optimize the overall performance of their software applications.
2. End-User Experience Monitoring (EUM): With End-User Monitoring (EUM), New Relic tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications. It provides insights into how real users experience the application, helping businesses detect issues such as slow load times, crashes, and other problems that affect user satisfaction. By focusing on end-user performance, organizations can ensure a smooth, high-quality experience for their users.
3. Infrastructure Monitoring: In addition to APM, New Relic provides robust infrastructure monitoring capabilities, allowing teams to track the health of servers, containers, virtual machines, and cloud services. This is particularly useful for organizations operating in hybrid or cloud environments, where traditional monitoring tools may not provide full visibility into infrastructure health.
4. Cloud-Native Application Monitoring: As businesses move to the cloud and embrace cloud-native technologies such as containers and microservices, New Relic provides full-stack observability in these complex environments. It supports integration with cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and provides visibility into containerized applications running on Kubernetes, Docker, and other platforms.
5. Synthetic Monitoring: Synthetic monitoring allows businesses to simulate user interactions with their applications to proactively test performance and detect issues before real users encounter them. New Relic’s synthetic monitoring feature can simulate web transactions from different geographic locations to ensure that applications are performing optimally for users everywhere.
6. Business Transaction Monitoring: New Relic allows businesses to track business transactions in real-time, such as customer purchases, order processing, or data retrieval. By monitoring these key transactions across the application stack, New Relic provides visibility into critical business operations and ensures that they are running smoothly.
7. Database Performance Monitoring: New Relic provides deep insights into database performance by tracking slow queries, long-running database transactions, and other performance bottlenecks. It helps teams optimize database queries, improve response times, and ensure efficient use of database resources, which can have a significant impact on application performance.
8. Root Cause Diagnostics: When performance issues arise, New Relic automatically traces the path of a transaction through the entire application stack, helping teams pinpoint the root cause of problems quickly. This is particularly useful for identifying and resolving issues in complex, distributed systems, where multiple components may contribute to the problem.
9. Application Mapping and Dependency Analysis: New Relic automatically generates visual maps of an application’s architecture, showing how different components (e.g., servers, services, databases) are connected. This allows teams to see dependencies between various parts of the system and helps identify potential points of failure, improving troubleshooting and optimization efforts.
10. Alerting and Automation: New Relic provides customizable alerting capabilities, allowing businesses to set thresholds for key performance metrics and receive notifications when performance falls below acceptable levels. These alerts can be configured to trigger automated responses, such as scaling resources or restarting services, reducing the time it takes to address performance issues.

What are the Features of New Relic?

New Relic offers a wide range of powerful features designed to help organizations gain comprehensive visibility into the performance of their applications, infrastructure, and end-user experiences. Some of the standout features include:

1. Real-Time Monitoring: New Relic provides continuous, real-time monitoring of applications, databases, infrastructure, and user interactions, ensuring that performance issues are detected as soon as they occur.
2. Custom Dashboards: New Relic allows users to create custom dashboards that display the most relevant metrics for their organization. Dashboards can be tailored to track application health, resource utilization, and business transaction performance, giving teams the data they need at a glance.
3. Distributed Tracing: Distributed tracing allows businesses to trace requests across microservices and identify where delays or errors are occurring in the system. This is particularly valuable for organizations using microservices or cloud-native architectures, where transactions can span multiple services and components.
4. Synthetic Monitoring: New Relic’s synthetic monitoring allows businesses to simulate user interactions with their applications from different geographic locations, helping to identify performance issues proactively before real users are affected.
5. Mobile and Web Monitoring: New Relic tracks mobile app and web performance, including load times, crashes, and user interactions. It provides insights into how well mobile apps and websites are performing and where improvements can be made to enhance the user experience.
6. Infrastructure Monitoring: New Relic provides detailed infrastructure monitoring, tracking the health and performance of servers, containers, virtual machines, and cloud resources. This feature helps businesses identify resource utilization issues and optimize infrastructure costs.
7. Alerting and Automation: With customizable alerting, New Relic helps businesses stay on top of performance issues by notifying teams when predefined thresholds are exceeded. Automated responses can also be triggered to address issues without manual intervention.
8. Business Analytics: New Relic’s analytics capabilities allow businesses to correlate application performance with business outcomes, such as revenue or user engagement. By analyzing this data, organizations can make data-driven decisions to improve both application performance and business results.
9. Third-Party Integrations: New Relic integrates with various third-party tools and services, including AWS, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Slack, PagerDuty, and more. These integrations allow businesses to seamlessly share performance data across platforms and improve collaboration.
10. Full-Stack Observability: New Relic provides full-stack observability by offering deep insights into every layer of the application stack, from the front-end user experience to the back-end databases and infrastructure. This allows teams to track performance across complex, distributed environments and ensure that all components work together efficiently.

How New Relic Works and Architecture?

New Relic works by collecting telemetry data from multiple sources, including applications, infrastructure, and user interactions, and providing real-time insights into their performance. The platform is based on a cloud-native, distributed architecture, which is designed to scale with the needs of modern, complex applications.

1. New Relic Agents: New Relic uses lightweight agents that are installed on application servers, databases, and other infrastructure components. These agents collect performance data, such as transaction times, error rates, and resource usage, and send it to the New Relic Controller.
2. New Relic Controller: The Controller is the central unit that receives data from the agents and processes it in real-time. It stores the data, analyzes it, and presents it in an easy-to-understand format through New Relic’s web-based dashboard.
3. Data Collection and Analysis: New Relic agents continuously collect data from applications and infrastructure components. This data is sent to the Controller, where it is processed and analyzed. The platform uses advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms to identify patterns, spot anomalies, and generate insights.
4. Dashboards and Visualization: The platform presents data through customizable dashboards, which allow users to visualize performance metrics and trends. Dashboards can be tailored to track specific applications, services, or business transactions, providing businesses with the insights they need to optimize performance.

How to Install New Relic?

To install New Relic on your system, you need to follow the steps appropriate for the platform and application you’re monitoring (e.g., servers, applications, or infrastructure). Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Sign Up and Access New Relic

• Visit New Relic and create an account if you don’t already have one.
• Log in to your New Relic dashboard.

2. Choose the Application Type

• Navigate to the Quickstart section or Add more data in your New Relic dashboard.
• Select the type of data or application you want to monitor (e.g., APM for application performance, infrastructure monitoring, etc.).

3. Select the Language or Platform

• New Relic supports several languages and platforms, such as:
  • Java
  • Node.js
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • .NET
  • PHP
  • Go
  • iOS/Android
  • Infrastructure Monitoring

Choose the appropriate option for your use case.

4. Install the New Relic Agent

Follow the specific instructions for your platform:

For Applications

• Install the New Relic Agent:
  • Use your application’s package manager to install the agent. For example:
    • Java: Add the agent JAR file to your JVM startup options.
    • Node.js: Run npm install newrelic in your project directory.
    • Python: Run pip install newrelic to add the agent to your environment.
• Update Configuration:
  • Update the newrelic.config file or environment variables with your New Relic license key and application name.
• Restart Your Application:
  • Restart your application server to begin monitoring.

For Servers

• Install the New Relic Infrastructure Agent:
  • For Linux: Follow the instructions to download and install the agent for your Linux distribution.

curl -Ls https://download.newrelic.com/infrastructure_agent/gpg/newrelic-infra.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.newrelic.com/infrastructure_agent/linux/apt focal main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/newrelic-infra.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install newrelic-infra

• For Windows: Download and run the New Relic installer executable.

5. Configure the Agent

• Open the agent configuration file and add your license key. For example:
  • For Java: Edit newrelic.yml or use environment variables.
  • For Infrastructure: Configure the newrelic-infra.yml file.
• Ensure proper permissions and paths for the agent to access logs and other necessary resources.

6. Verify Installation

• After installing and starting the agent, return to the New Relic dashboard.
• Verify that data is flowing in the APM or Infrastructure section.

7. Enable Alerts and Dashboards

• Set up custom alerts, dashboards, or integrations with third-party tools like Slack or PagerDuty for notifications.

8. Test and Optimize

• Use New Relic’s distributed tracing, error analytics, and performance dashboards to fine-tune your application.

Additional Tips:

• Check the New Relic Documentation for detailed installation steps for specific platforms.
• If you encounter issues, use the New Relic Diagnostics CLI to troubleshoot. Run:

newrelic-diagnostics

Would you like more help with a specific part of the installation process?

Additional Setup (Optional):

• Configure Alerts: Set up custom alerts for performance thresholds, such as response time, error rates, or throughput.
• Create Custom Dashboards: Visualize the data that is most important to your business by creating custom dashboards.

Basic Tutorials of New Relic: Getting Started

1. Navigating the Dashboard: Get familiar with the New Relic dashboard. This is where you can view all your performance data in real-time. The dashboard allows you to customize views based on specific metrics that are important for your organization.
2. Setting Up Business Transactions: Learn how to define and monitor business transactions, which represent key processes within your application, such as user sign-ups, purchases, or payment processing.
3. Creating Custom Dashboards: New Relic allows you to create custom dashboards to track specific metrics that matter most to your business. Learn how to set up these dashboards for maximum visibility.
4. Using Distributed Tracing: Explore how distributed tracing works and learn how to trace transactions as they move through different services and components of your application.
5. Setting Alerts: Set up custom alert thresholds to ensure that your team is notified when application performance falls below acceptable levels.
6. Analyzing Logs: Use New Relic’s log management features to aggregate, search, and analyze logs across your infrastructure. This helps you gain deeper insights into application performance and troubleshoot issues faster.