Application Performance Management (APM) with New Relic Training Course

Introduction to Application Performance Monitoring

• Exploring the fundamentals of Application Performance Management (APM) and its significance in modern application operations
• Examining the interplay between application performance, availability, reliability, and the overall customer experience
• Reviewing key performance indicators (KPIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs)
• Recognizing common factors contributing to application performance degradation
• Overview of the monitoring lifecycle: observation, analysis, diagnosis, remediation, and optimization
• Understanding New Relic’s role in enabling full-stack observability

New Relic Features and Architecture

• Overview of the New Relic platform and its primary capabilities
• Comprehending New Relic’s architecture and data flow mechanisms
• Introduction to New Relic agents, data collectors, and telemetry streams
• Overview of metrics, events, logs, distributed traces, and error records
• 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
• Key concepts in data retention, querying, and visualization

Navigating the New Relic User Interface

• Guided navigation of the New Relic platform and primary dashboards
• Managing applications, services, hosts, and entities within the interface
• Exploring performance summaries and application health indicators
• Utilizing charts, data tables, filters, and time-range adjustments
• Searching and analyzing telemetry data for insights
• Customizing dashboards and views to suit specific needs
• Creating operational and performance-focused 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
• Strategies for instrumentation, comparing automatic versus manual approaches
• Setting up browser and end-user monitoring capabilities
• Validating agent installation and ensuring telemetry collection is active
• Managing configuration files and environment-specific settings
• Troubleshooting common agent installation and data collection challenges
• Best practices for deploying agents securely and maintaining them effectively

Measuring Application Performance from the End-User Perspective

• Understanding the principles of Real User Monitoring (RUM)
• Measuring page-load times and application response speeds
• Monitoring browser performance and user interaction patterns
• Identifying slow-loading pages, transactions, and user journeys
• Analyzing performance variations based on geography and device type
• Correlating end-user experience metrics 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 the concept of application transactions
• Interpreting data on response time, throughput, and error rates
• Understanding transaction breakdowns and performance segments
• Analyzing dependencies on external services
• Examining application errors and associated error traces
• Identifying bottlenecks through instrumentation data analysis
• Using traces to track requests as they move across application components
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces to facilitate root-cause analysis
• Practical exercises in interpreting application telemetry data

Measuring Application Resources and Infrastructure

• Monitoring resource utilization across applications and servers
• Understanding the impact of CPU, memory, disk, and network performance
• Identifying resource saturation and capacity-related constraints
• Correlating infrastructure metrics with application response times
• Monitoring application processes and workload distribution
• Identifying transactions that consume high resource levels
• Investigating performance degradation resulting from infrastructure limitations
• Establishing performance baselines and detecting abnormal behavior

Monitoring and Notifications

• Understanding the core concepts of alerting in New Relic
• Defining alert conditions and setting appropriate thresholds
• Creating alerts focused on application performance and availability
• Monitoring key metrics such as error rates, response times, throughput, and resource usage
• Designing alert policies that drive actionable responses
• Configuring notification channels and defining incident workflows
• Reducing alert fatigue and eliminating unnecessary notifications
• Understanding incident management and issue correlation
• Testing and validating alert configurations for accuracy
• Best practices for proactive application monitoring

Monitoring Database Operations

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

Reporting and Visualizing Application Performance

• Creating meaningful and insightful performance reports
• Building dashboards tailored for development, operations, and management teams
• Selecting the most relevant metrics for different stakeholder groups
• Visualizing key indicators such as 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 progress against objectives

Analyzing and Optimizing Application Performance

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

Troubleshooting API and Service Issues

• Monitoring APIs and dependencies on external services
• Measuring API response times, throughput, and error rates
• Identifying slow or unreliable API endpoints
• Diagnosing timeout and connectivity-related issues
• Analyzing failed API transactions
• Using traces to identify bottlenecks across distributed services
• Correlating API problems 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
• Following request flows across 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 using 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 for analysis
• Analyzing response times, errors, throughput, and transaction data
• Creating custom visualizations from query results
• Using queries to support troubleshooting and reporting efforts
• Building reusable queries and dashboards
• Practical exercises in NRQL

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 mechanisms
• Configuring notifications and external service integrations
• 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 from end-user performance data
• Analyzing application transactions and associated errors
• Investigating infrastructure and database performance factors
• Tracing dependencies on APIs and external services
• Correlating metrics, events, logs, and traces
• Identifying the most likely root cause of the issue
• Developing and validating a remediation approach
• Configuring alerts to prevent recurrence
• 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 defining 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 support continuous improvement initiatives
• Translating technical performance 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 concepts
• Recap of troubleshooting and root-cause analysis techniques
• Review of alerting, dashboards, reporting, and integrations
• Final hands-on performance investigation session
• Discussion of real-world implementation scenarios
• Questions and answers session
• Recommended next steps for applying New Relic in production environments