Application Performance Management (APM) with New Relic Training Course

Introduction to Application Performance Monitoring

• Exploring the role of Application Performance Management (APM) in contemporary application operations
• The interplay between application performance, availability, reliability, and customer satisfaction
• Essential performance indicators and defining service-level objectives
• Recognizing common causes of application performance degradation
• An overview of the monitoring lifecycle: observation, analysis, diagnosis, remediation, and optimization
• The specific role of New Relic in achieving full-stack observability

New Relic Features and Architecture

• An overview of the New Relic platform and its primary capabilities
• Understanding the architectural components and data flow within New Relic
• The function of agents, collectors, and telemetry data
• Overview of key data types: metrics, events, logs, traces, and errors
• Covering APM, browser monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and database monitoring
• Understanding core concepts such as entities, services, applications, and workloads
• Introduction to distributed tracing and understanding service dependencies
• Concepts of data retention, querying, and visualization

Navigating the New Relic User Interface

• Mastering navigation through the New Relic platform and primary dashboards
• Managing applications, services, hosts, and entities
• Exploring performance summaries and overall application health
• Utilizing charts, tables, filters, and time-range adjustments
• Searching and analyzing telemetry data effectively
• Customizing dashboards and views to suit specific needs
• Creating operational and performance dashboards that drive action
• Using New Relic to transition from high-level symptoms to precise diagnostics

Setting Up and Configuring New Relic Agents

• Understanding agent architecture and compatible environments
• Installing New Relic agents on application servers
• Tailoring agent configuration for specific application monitoring needs
• Strategies for instrumentation, including automatic vs. manual approaches
• Configuring browser and end-user monitoring capabilities
• Validating successful agent installation and telemetry collection
• Managing configuration settings specific to different environments
• Troubleshooting common issues with agent installation and data collection
• Best practices for secure and maintainable agent deployment

Measuring Application Performance from the End-User Perspective

• Understanding Real User Monitoring (RUM) principles
• Measuring page load times and overall application response speeds
• Monitoring browser performance and user interaction patterns
• Identifying slow pages, transactions, and problematic user journeys
• Analyzing performance variations based on geography and device type
• Correlating the end-user experience with backend application performance
• Identifying issues that directly impact customer satisfaction
• Using performance data to prioritize optimization efforts

Reading and Understanding Instrumentation Data

• Understanding transaction traces and application-level transactions
• Interpreting data related to response time, throughput, and error rates
• Breaking down transactions to analyze specific performance segments
• Analyzing external service calls and dependencies
• Examining application errors and their associated traces
• Identifying bottlenecks through detailed instrumentation data
• Using traces to track requests across various application components
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces for comprehensive root-cause analysis
• Practical exercises in interpreting application telemetry

Measuring Application Resources and Infrastructure

• Monitoring resource utilization for both applications and servers
• Understanding performance metrics for CPU, memory, disk, and network
• Identifying resource saturation and capacity-related challenges
• Correlating infrastructure metrics with application response times
• Monitoring specific application processes and workloads
• Identifying transactions that consume excessive resources
• Investigating performance drops caused by infrastructure limitations
• Establishing baselines to detect abnormal behavior

Monitoring and Notifications

• Understanding core alerting concepts in New Relic
• Defining specific alert conditions and thresholds
• Creating alerts focused on application performance and availability
• Monitoring key metrics including error rates, response times, throughput, and resource usage
• Designing alert policies that lead to actionable outcomes
• Configuring notification channels and incident response workflows
• Minimizing alert noise to avoid unnecessary interruptions
• Understanding incident management and issue correlation
• Testing and validating alert configurations
• Best practices for proactive application monitoring

Monitoring Database Operations

• Understanding the link between database and application performance
• Monitoring database calls and query activities
• Identifying slow database operations
• Analyzing database response times in detail
• Detecting inefficient or resource-heavy queries
• Correlating database operations with specific application transactions
• Investigating bottlenecks related to database interactions
• Using performance data to optimize query response times
• Practical exercises in diagnosing database performance issues

Reporting and Visualizing Application Performance

• Creating meaningful and actionable performance reports
• Building dashboards tailored for development, operations, and management teams
• Selecting the most relevant metrics for different stakeholder groups
• Visualizing availability, response time, throughput, and errors
• Tracking performance trends over extended periods
• Comparing performance across different environments
• Presenting technical data as business-relevant insights
• Establishing baselines and reporting progress against objectives

Analyzing and Optimizing Application Performance

• Establishing a systematic approach to performance analysis
• Identifying bottlenecks and abnormal system behavior
• Analyzing transaction response times and throughput levels
• Comparing current performance against historical baselines
• Correlating multiple telemetry sources during investigations
• Prioritizing issues based on user and business impact
• Identifying opportunities for application optimization
• Validating improvements using New Relic data
• Hands-on exercises in performance analysis

Troubleshooting API and Service Issues

• Monitoring APIs and external service dependencies
• Measuring API response times, throughput, and error rates
• Identifying slow or unreliable API endpoints
• Diagnosing timeout and connectivity problems
• Analyzing failed API transactions
• Using traces to locate bottlenecks across distributed services
• Correlating API issues with downstream dependencies
• Determining the root cause of API performance degradation
• Developing and validating effective remediation strategies

Distributed Tracing and End-to-End Troubleshooting

• Understanding distributed applications and their service dependencies
• Introduction to the concepts of distributed tracing
• Following requests across multiple application services
• Identifying latency introduced by specific services
• Analyzing communication patterns between services
• Detecting failures across distributed components
• Correlating traces with logs, errors, and infrastructure metrics
• Performing comprehensive end-to-end root-cause analysis
• Practical troubleshooting scenarios in a live-lab environment

Querying and Analyzing New Relic Data

• Introduction to querying telemetry data within New Relic
• Understanding the New Relic Query Language (NRQL)
• Writing queries to investigate specific performance aspects
• Filtering and aggregating metrics and events for deeper insights
• Analyzing response times, errors, throughput, and transaction data
• Creating custom visualizations from query outputs
• Using queries to support troubleshooting and reporting efforts
• Building reusable queries and dashboards
• Practical exercises in using NRQL

Integrating New Relic with Third-Party Tools and Services

• Overview of available New Relic integrations
• Connecting New Relic with infrastructure and cloud platforms
• Linking monitoring data with collaboration and incident management tools
• Understanding integration workflows and data exchange processes
• Configuring notifications and external service integrations
• Using integrations to enhance DevOps and incident response processes
• Best practices for maintaining reliable monitoring integrations

Practical Troubleshooting Workshop

• Investigating a simulated application performance incident
• Identifying symptoms through end-user performance data
• Analyzing application transactions and associated errors
• Investigating infrastructure and database performance impacts
• Tracing dependencies on APIs and external services
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces for a complete picture
• Identifying the most probable root cause
• Developing and validating a remediation approach
• Configuring alerts to prevent future occurrences
• Documenting findings and communicating business impact

Monitoring Best Practices and Operational Recommendations

• Designing an effective strategy for New Relic monitoring
• Selecting meaningful metrics for performance and availability
• Establishing baselines and defining service-level objectives
• Avoiding excessive monitoring noise
• Developing effective alerting and escalation practices
• Maintaining consistent monitoring across dev, test, and production
• Using observability data to drive continuous improvement
• Translating technical data into actionable business insights

Summary and Conclusion

• Review of New Relic architecture and core capabilities
• Summary of application, infrastructure, database, API, and end-user monitoring
• Recap of troubleshooting and root-cause analysis techniques
• Review of alerting, dashboards, reporting, and integrations
• Final hands-on performance investigation
• Discussion of real-world implementation scenarios
• Questions and answers
• Recommended next steps for deploying New Relic in production