Application Performance Management (APM) with New Relic Training Course

Introduction to Application Performance Monitoring

• Understanding Application Performance Management (APM) and its significance in modern application operations
• The interplay between application performance, availability, reliability, and customer experience
• Key performance indicators and service-level objectives for applications
• Identifying common root causes of application performance degradation
• An overview of the application monitoring lifecycle: observation, analysis, diagnosis, remediation, and optimization
• The role of New Relic in comprehensive full-stack observability

New Relic Features and Architecture

• An overview of the New Relic platform and its fundamental capabilities
• Understanding New Relic’s architecture and data flow mechanisms
• New Relic agents, collectors, and the nature of telemetry data
• Overview of core data types: metrics, events, logs, traces, and errors
• Scope of Application Performance Monitoring (APM), browser monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and database monitoring
• Understanding key concepts: entities, services, applications, and workloads
• Introduction to distributed tracing and service dependencies
• Concepts of data retention, querying, and visualization

Navigating the New Relic User Interface

• Navigating the New Relic platform and accessing main dashboards
• Working with applications, services, hosts, and entities
• Exploring performance summaries and application health status
• Utilizing charts, tables, filters, and time range selection
• Searching and analyzing telemetry data
• Customizing dashboards and views to suit specific needs
• Creating effective operational and performance dashboards
• Using New Relic to transition from high-level symptoms to detailed diagnostics

Setting Up and Configuring New Relic Agents

• Understanding New Relic agent architecture and supported environments
• Installing New Relic agents on application servers
• Configuring agents for application-specific monitoring requirements
• Instrumentation strategies: automatic versus manual approaches
• Setting up browser and end-user monitoring
• Validating agent installation and telemetry data collection
• Managing configuration and environment-specific settings
• Troubleshooting issues related to 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)
• Measuring page-load times and application response rates
• Monitoring browser performance and user interactions
• Identifying slow pages, transactions, and user journeys
• Analyzing performance variations by geography and device
• Correlating end-user experience with backend application performance
• Identifying performance issues that directly impact customer satisfaction
• Leveraging performance data to prioritize optimization efforts

Reading and Understanding Instrumentation Data

• Understanding transaction traces and application transactions
• Interpreting data on response time, throughput, and error rates
• Understanding transaction breakdowns and performance segments
• Analyzing external services and dependencies
• Examining application errors and associated error traces
• Identifying bottlenecks through instrumentation data
• Using traces to track requests across various application components
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces for root-cause analysis
• Practical exercises in interpreting application telemetry

Measuring Application Resources and Infrastructure

• Monitoring resource utilization across applications and servers
• Understanding CPU, memory, disk, and network performance metrics
• Identifying resource saturation and capacity-related constraints
• Correlating infrastructure metrics with application response times
• Monitoring application processes and active workloads
• Identifying resource-intensive transactions
• Investigating performance degradation stemming from infrastructure limitations
• Establishing performance baselines and detecting abnormal behavior

Monitoring and Notifications

• Understanding New Relic’s alerting concepts
• Defining specific alert conditions and thresholds
• Creating alerts for application performance and availability
• Monitoring error rates, response times, throughput, and resource usage
• Designing actionable alert policies
• Configuring notification channels and incident response workflows
• Reducing alert noise and preventing unnecessary notifications
• Understanding incidents and correlating related issues
• Testing and validating alert configurations
• Best practices for proactive application monitoring

Monitoring Database Operations

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

Reporting and Visualizing Application Performance

• Creating meaningful and informative performance reports
• Building dashboards tailored for development, operations, and management teams
• Selecting appropriate metrics for different stakeholder groups
• Visualizing application availability, response time, throughput, and errors
• 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 set objectives

Analyzing and Optimizing Application Performance

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

Troubleshooting API and Service Issues

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

Distributed Tracing and End-to-End Troubleshooting

• Understanding distributed applications and their service dependencies
• Introduction to the concepts of distributed tracing
• Tracking requests across multiple application services
• Identifying latency introduced by individual services
• Analyzing communication 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 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 application performance aspects
• Filtering and aggregating metrics and events
• Analyzing response times, errors, throughput, and transaction data
• Creating custom visualizations from query results
• Utilizing queries to support troubleshooting and reporting efforts
• Building reusable queries and dashboards
• Practical NRQL exercises

Integrating New Relic with Third-Party Tools and Services

• Overview of available New Relic integrations
• Integrating New Relic with various infrastructure and cloud platforms
• Connecting monitoring data with collaboration and incident management tools
• Understanding integration workflows and data exchange processes
• Configuring notifications and external service integrations
• Leveraging 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 from end-user performance data
• Analyzing application transactions and error logs
• Investigating infrastructure and database performance issues
• Tracing API and external service dependencies
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces
• Identifying the most probable root cause
• Developing and validating a remediation approach
• Configuring alerts to prevent similar incidents in the future
• Documenting findings and communicating the business impact

Monitoring Best Practices and Operational Recommendations

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

Summary and Conclusion

• Review of New Relic architecture and core capabilities
• Review 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 session
• Recommended next steps for applying New Relic in production environments