Application Performance Management (APM) with New Relic Training Course

Introduction to Application Performance Monitoring

• Comprehending Application Performance Management (APM) and its significance in contemporary application operations
• The interplay between application performance, availability, reliability, and customer experience
• Essential application performance indicators and service-level objectives
• Recognizing common factors contributing to application performance degradation
• An overview of the application monitoring lifecycle: observation, analysis, diagnosis, remediation, and optimization
• Understanding New Relic's role in comprehensive full-stack observability

New Relic Capabilities and Architecture

• Overview of the New Relic platform and its primary features
• Insights into New Relic's architecture and data flow mechanisms
• New Relic agents, collectors, and the handling of telemetry data
• An overview of metrics, events, logs, traces, and error tracking
• Coverage of Application Performance Monitoring (APM), browser monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and database monitoring
• Understanding the concepts of entities, services, applications, and workloads
• Introduction to distributed tracing and mapping service dependencies
• Concepts related to data retention, querying, and visualization

Navigating the New Relic Interface

• Guided navigation through the New Relic platform and primary dashboards
• Managing applications, services, hosts, and entities within the platform
• Exploring performance summaries and assessing application health
• Utilizing charts, tables, filters, and time range selections
• Searching and interpreting telemetry data effectively
• Personalizing dashboards and views to suit specific needs
• Constructing practical dashboards for operational and performance oversight
• Leveraging New Relic to transition from high-level symptoms to granular diagnostics

Deployment and Configuration of New Relic Agents

• Understanding New Relic agent architecture and supported runtime environments
• Installing New Relic agents on application servers
• Tailoring agent configurations for application-specific monitoring requirements
• Strategies for instrumentation, including automatic versus manual approaches
• Setting up browser and end-user monitoring capabilities
• Verifying agent installation and ensuring telemetry collection is functional
• Managing configuration settings specific to different environments
• Troubleshooting potential issues with agent installation and data collection
• Best practices for secure and maintainable agent deployment

Assessing Application Performance from the End-User Viewpoint

• Understanding the principles of real-user monitoring (RUM)
• Measuring page load times and overall application response speeds
• Monitoring browser performance and tracking user interactions
• Identifying slow-loading pages, transactions, and user journey bottlenecks
• Analyzing performance variations based on geographic location and device type
• Correlating end-user experience metrics with backend application performance
• Identifying performance issues that have a direct impact on customer satisfaction
• Using performance data to prioritize optimization efforts effectively

Interpreting Instrumentation Data

• Understanding transaction traces and the structure of application transactions
• Interpreting data related to response time, throughput, and error rates
• Analyzing transaction breakdowns and specific performance segments
• Evaluating the impact of external services and dependencies
• Examining application errors and associated error traces
• Identifying performance bottlenecks through instrumentation data
• Using traces to track requests as they move across application components
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces to perform root-cause analysis
• Practical exercises focused on interpreting application telemetry

Monitoring Application Resources and Infrastructure

• Tracking resource utilization for both applications and servers
• Understanding performance aspects of CPU, memory, disk, and network
• Identifying resource saturation and capacity-related constraints
• Correlating infrastructure metrics with application response times
• Monitoring active application processes and workloads
• Identifying transactions that consume excessive resources
• Investigating performance degradation resulting from infrastructure limitations
• Establishing performance baselines and detecting abnormal behavior patterns

Monitoring and Alerting Mechanisms

• Understanding the core concepts of New Relic alerting
• Defining specific alert conditions and threshold limits
• Creating alerts for application performance and availability metrics
• Monitoring error rates, response times, throughput, and resource usage
• Designing alert policies that drive actionable responses
• Configuring notification channels and establishing incident workflows
• Minimizing alert noise and avoiding unnecessary notifications
• Understanding incident management and issue correlation
• Testing and verifying alert configurations for accuracy
• Best practices for proactive application monitoring

Monitoring Database Activities

• Understanding the link between database performance and overall application performance
• Monitoring database calls and tracking query activity
• Identifying slow database operations that impact performance
• Analyzing database response time metrics
• Detecting inefficient or resource-heavy queries
• Correlating database operations with specific application transactions
• Investigating application bottlenecks related to database performance
• Utilizing performance data to enhance query response times
• Practical exercises for diagnosing database performance challenges

Reporting and Visualizing Performance Data

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

Analyzing and Optimizing Performance

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

Troubleshooting API and Service Challenges

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

Distributed Tracing and End-to-End Diagnosis

• Understanding distributed applications and the mapping of service dependencies
• Introduction to the concepts of distributed tracing
• Tracking requests as they traverse multiple application services
• Identifying latency introduced by individual services
• Analyzing communication patterns between services
• Detecting failures across distributed application components
• Correlating traces with logs, errors, and infrastructure metrics
• Performing comprehensive end-to-end root-cause analysis
• Practical troubleshooting scenarios utilizing 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 application performance issues
• Filtering and aggregating metrics and events for analysis
• Analyzing response times, errors, throughput, and transaction data
• Creating custom visualizations based on query results
• Using queries to support troubleshooting efforts and reporting
• Building reusable queries and dashboard components
• Practical exercises in writing and using NRQL

Integrating New Relic with Third-Party Tools

• Overview of available New Relic integrations
• Integrating New Relic with infrastructure and cloud platforms
• Connecting monitoring data with collaboration and incident-management tools
• Understanding integration workflows and data exchange mechanisms
• Configuring notifications and integrations with external services
• Using integrations to support 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 performance at the infrastructure and database levels
• Tracing dependencies on APIs and external services
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces for a holistic view
• Identifying the most likely root cause of the incident
• Developing and validating a remediation approach
• Configuring alerts to prevent future occurrences
• Documenting findings and communicating the business impact

Monitoring Best Practices and Operational Advice

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

Summary and Conclusion

• Review of New Relic architecture and its core capabilities
• Review of monitoring for applications, infrastructure, databases, APIs, and end-users
• Recap of troubleshooting methodologies and root-cause analysis techniques
• Review of alerting, dashboards, reporting, and integration strategies
• Final hands-on performance investigation exercise
• Discussion of real-world implementation scenarios
• Questions and answers session
• Recommended next steps for applying New Relic in production environments